Stump is a blogging project of Claremont Presbyterian Church. This is the second camel post. Find the other one here.
The Sunday-school materials I remember from my youth were full of pictures of camels, because they appear often in the stories in the Hebrew Scriptures and even in Jesus’ teaching. Think of Abraham and Sarah journeying to a new home and a new life with camels among their livestock. In Advent we remember that artists over the ages have imagined that the wise men came from the East on camels to find the baby Jesus. In these pictures camels always look majestic. People who have experienced live camels up close, however, say that they are cantankerous and often uncooperative. They look strangely engineered and awkward. Nonetheless camels are amazingly well adapted to the desert world in which they live, able to carry with them life-giving water while they travel many miles with heavy burdens.They keep their families with them and often travel in caravans. They provide milk, meat, shelter, and clothing for the people whom they accompany and transport, so they are closely woven into human society.
(I didn’t know till I took my grandchildren to the Webb School Museum that there were once little camels in our part of the world. I wonder what they were like.)
In the church year we often think of Advent as a time of desert and wilderness, of journey, so the camel jogs our reflections during these weeks. Let me offer a few suggestions.
—God must often see humanity behaving much like those ill-tempered camels, not like the beautiful creatures humans were created to be, in the image of God, yet God keeps on trying to help us find the role for which we were created.
—The critical importance of camels in traditional middle-eastern society reminds us how interwoven are all the parts of the planet’s ecosystem: earth, water, air, plants, animals, and people. When one suffers, all suffer. Human survival will require the nurturing of the whole ecosystem, a stark reality that confronts us urgently at this moment in history.
—As we journey, God provides us with the life-giving water of faith that can sustain us in harsh and barren places, and strength even for a long and difficult journey. We take our families with us, and we travel as people of faith in caravans. All across the globe we find Christians who accompany us on our journey and offer us companionship and mutual support.
Jane Dempsey Douglass, elder, resident of Pilgrim Place.
YoRocko! 