Cultivating Calling and Pilgrimage is a meandering column documenting the pilgrimage of faith. It’s an occasional letter arriving in the mail from that shabby, wandering uncle you only see a few times year, describing the odd bits and bobs of books, songs, stories, people and places that have struck his fancy, put a lump in his throat, or kept him putting one foot in front of the other toward the Face of Jesus, that Joy set before us all.
I milked a goat. I don’t normally milk goats. Do you? Maybe you do; however, I don’t typically have any at hand for the milking. But last week, I was visiting my friend Will just outside of town, and he had some chores around his place to get done before we could sit down to the homemade pizza his wife was cooking on the porch not far away.
The pizza smelled wonderful. So did the hay and the alfalfa pellets we poured into a big bucket for the goats to eat while we milked them. The smell of the pellets took me back to a time in my childhood when our family had a pet lop-eared rabbit named Angora. Angora got pretty big. Then, she got bigger. Not long after that, she must’ve decided it couldn’t hurt to get even bigger than before, which she proceeded to do, until she was quite unmistakably huge.
Angora could, huge as she was, easily jump from the ground to the countertops in my mom’s ceramic studio. This was undesirable. This jumping of Angora’s resulted in the unfortunate breakage of many a fragile clay figure shaped by my mother’s careful hands. As you can imagine, Angora, in spite of all the fat, fluffy lop-eared innocence in the world, had to go. We did not eat her—there probably weren’t enough of us to do so—instead, we relocated her to another family’s place, where she could live large in the great outdoors. So far as I know, that’s just what Angora’s been doing ever since.
But back to goat-milking. Goats don’t really love to be milked all that much. You have to put them in goat-prison first, sort of like they used to put a criminal in the stocks in the old days. These are not criminal goats—at least the one I milked had been convicted of no crimes—yet we had her neck in the stocks. I did meet a criminal goat once. I was a kid myself on a field trip to the zoo, when said transgressive goat gulped down my name tag. I had gotten a smidge too close. Of course, I ended up in trouble for losing my identification badge. That goat made precisely zero confessions or apologies.
My friend Will got things started with the milking, then offered me the job. My hands were too cold at first and the goat kicked at me a few times. So I rubbed my palms together quickly to warm them up. That seemed to ease things along, and after a few good pointers from Will, I had become a successful and prosperous first-time goat milker. That felt wonderful. I also felt that, if I did this every day, I would have forearms the size of Ren Faire turkey legs in no time.
Wandering around the barnyard while all of this was going on was a lovely year-old heifer, caramel-colored and, honestly, just beautiful of face. I remembered the ice cream brand I grew up with most was called Borden, and their logo was the face of a pretty heifer, Elsie. I had thought the logo strange and sentimental: how could a cow be pretty like that? Most of us probably don’t get to spend a lot of time around young cows, but as it turns out they really do have striking faces. In particular, their eyes: large, dark, and long-lashed, appear profoundly kind. I can understand why Walt Wangerin Jr. chose, in his animal fable The Book of the Dun Cow, to make the Christ figure a brown cow whose “liquid eyes, so soft with sympathy”[1] could communicate the tenderness and compassion of our Redeemer. I wanted to scratch her neck and visit more, but she was soon off to greener pastures.
Meanwhile, that pizza never did stop smelling good. The chores wrapped up, and we put things away. Will strained the milk and we tried it just minutes after—and we said, along with the Lord in Genesis, “it is good!”
The rest of the evening was wonderful. We finally got to that homemade pizza, played some board games, and, after a short walk beneath the full moon, visited over hot decaf coffee. In many ways, it was a simple visit, a simple goodness, and only my first time stopping by to see these newer friends at their home. To write about it here is to pay a special kind of attention, which can make it feel maybe more grand than it felt in the moment. In the moment, it felt very ordinary, and good. In the moment I didn’t tell any funny stories about Angora or criminal goats from my kindergarten days. Yet, as I recall and attend in order to recount it to you, that evening gathers all kinds of joy around it—joy that was there at the time, but that rested quietly in the quiet spaces, in the normalcy of doing chores, petting a cow, small talk over pizza, of getting my rear-end kicked in a board game, of noticing our own shadows cast under the face of a great big moon.
When I think of the scenes that, for me, recall most a sense of merriment, they tend to be scenes like these. They are spans of time when I was with people, enjoying some simple good thing together. Often, I don’t notice these things at the time; it’s usually later I see them for what they were. However, sometimes I’m lucky enough to catch what’s going on, to stop, and to mark the moment aloud. Some friends and I christened those lucky instances of awareness “wonder-nuggets.” A wonder-nugget may be as hard to explain as it is impossible to conjure. In the midst of such a moment, the feeling is most like heartbreak, but heartbreaking joy. There is a sense of time’s real meaning, which is in no way related to the hands on a clock, but is a taste of endless goodness welling up within a given instant. Everything, you sense, is involved in an endless music, each body somebody dancing in a gorgeous stillness that is pluming out like glistening galaxies. It is poignant because eternity is poking up like a sewing needle through ordinary time and ordinary time and place are sensing themselves clothed, however briefly, in the dream-garments of all that they shall one day, by God’s grace, be.
Wonder-nuggets are worth marking, even if it creates an awkward moment. I’ll submit that often awkwardness is a component of merriment, if it is embraced.
One of my wonder-nuggets is just a particular time a bunch of friends were all crammed in a tiny kitchen in Memphis washing dishes together after dinner. I don’t remember the dinner itself—funnily enough, it was working with each other to put the kitchen back together that somehow broke through into wonder-nugget territory. Merriment may sneak up on us like that.
Another involves a different farmyard adventure with a family I love in Texas. I was spending a week with them at a cabin on the Brazos River, and one day a raggedy old donkey strolled up to check us out. Five kids and three adults pretty quickly gathered around to greet her with apples and carrots. There she stood, long-faced, ancient and gentle as could be, while we talked with her, petted her, and eventually voted to give her the name “Mrs. Carrots.” She grew attached to us and the attachment was mutual.
In the evenings, we’d sit on the porch beneath the rural star-crammed sky, listening to favorite music, telling stories, and getting sillier and sillier as the time we’d long lost track of wore on. I remember we could see lightning storms far across the Texas plains, gamboling among the clouds. Mrs. Carrots would wander up now and then to see what all the laughter was about.
[1] Walt Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 211.
The featured image, “Lake District Sheep in Field,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.
Matthew Clark is a singer/songwriter and storyteller from Mississippi. He has recorded several full length albums, including a Bible walk-through called “Bright Came the Word from His Mouth” and “Beautiful Secret Life.” Matthew’s current project, “The Well Trilogy,” consists of 3 full-length album/book combos releasing over 3 years. Each installment is made up of 11 songs and a companion book of 13 essays written by a variety of contributors exploring themes around encountering Jesus, faith-keeping, and the return of Christ. Part One, “Only the Lover Sings” is available both as an album and as a companion book.
Matthew also hosts a weekly podcast, “One Thousand Words – Stories on the Way,” featuring essays reflecting on faith-keeping. A touring musician and speaker, Matthew travels sharing songs and stories in a van called Vandalf.
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