Tag: Creation

A Tale of Two Pythons

If you happen to be growing up in a place like Melanesia, then you want to have a mother as adventurous as mine. My mom allowed us to have all kinds of unique pets over the years, and enjoyed them right along with us. In addition to seasons with dogs and cats, we also at times cared for snakes, tree frogs, owls, parrots, tree kangaroos, rabbits, lizards, turtles, praying mantises, and a baby bat. I would bring my pets proudly to school for show and tell, where they would wow my classmates and inevitably manage to relieve themselves on the classroom floor. Only one pet (a tree kangaroo) ever bit a classmate. Poor guy’s parents made him get a rabies shot. Do tree kangaroos even get rabies? Anyway, I digress.

When I was in junior high we purchased* our first emerald tree python from a local who was selling him on the street of the small government town nearby our missionary compound. These snakes are beautiful creatures, sporting bright yellow scales when they are young, which fade to a bright emerald green as they mature. They are small to medium constrictor snakes that like to eat birds and small mammals when they are in the wild. While newspaper flashbacks to the mid-twentieth century regularly included reports of giant pythons dropping out of the trees to attack an unsuspecting villager, we never saw any get to that size – with the exception of one terrifying carcass I saw at the river where we regularly swam. But the pythons that we owned were still adolescents, so only about a meter long, with a body diameter about the size of the hole made by a finger and thumb making the OK sign.

The first snake was as friendly and gentle as you could hope for. He never tried to bite us, and he enjoyed coiling up on my oldest brother’s laptop or on our shoulders, nestling in to get access to body heat. I have no idea what happened to him earlier in his serpentine life to give him such a pleasant disposition, but he was great, a true pal. Unfortunately, he managed to escape one day. An enterprising local caught him nearby our property and tried to resell him to us, in spite of our insistance that we were the rightful owners. But finders-keepers prevailed and we decided on principle not to buy him back. This was probably the wrong decision.

Some time later we saw another similar-sized python for sale for a good price. Fresh off such a positive experience with our first snake, we decided to get him. Unfortunately, while the first snake was a kindly soul, the second python proved to be very mean and aggressive. I remember staring through the glass terrarium walls with my brothers as the angry thing repeatedly lunged at the glass, trying to bite our faces. He would even snap at us when we attempted to feed him. Whatever we had named him in the beginning, we began to call him Demon Snake. Needless to say, Demon Snake did not get any snuggle time on our shoulders. He did, however, also manage to escape.

In the end, this was probably the best outcome for all parties. Like many pets taken from the jungle after a certain age, our second snake was wild and unlikely to get accustomed to relationships with humans. He needed his freedom where he could live out his grumpy ways in peace. But it seemed he didn’t desire complete independence from humans. One day my mom walked out onto our downstairs patio area where we had clotheslines hung under the roof for when it rained. Above the lines on the wooden rafters lounged the python, snoozing and looking fatter than usual.

Our former pet had managed to find himself a pretty good living situation. The rafters from the patio disappeared into a gap in between the upper and lower floors – a gap that apparently made for nice snake lodging, and one where big rats also lived. It seemed that he had learned to spend his days hunting the scratching rodents in between the floors and then lounging on the patio rafters where he could soak up the heat from the corrugated metal roof directly above him. Not a bad gig.

We developed quite the complementary relationship in the end. We let him be, and attracted the rats – presumably just by living normal life and eating delicious food, like fried and salted Asian sweet potatoes. He in turn hunted and ate the ROUS’s* which we had been until that point largely unable to trap or catch. We actually grew quite comfortable seeing him up above our heads taking his naps, and just had to make sure he wasn’t around to create any surprise appearances when we were hosting locals, most of whom were completely petrified of snakes.

We moved on from snakes after this experience, purchasing instead a gorgeous green and red Eclectus parrot who was one of our longer-lasting pets, managing in the end to very effectively confuse passersby with the whistles and unique phrases he had learned in the voice of each member of the family.

I’m not sure what became of the Demon Snake python in the end. We came back to the US for furlough for my eight grade year and never heard of him again. But I am grateful for all those rats he ate. Melanesian rats are no joke. I hope he lived out the remainder of his snake days a happier serpent than he had been, full of rodent, warm from corrugated metal roofing, and free from any more missionary kids hoping to snuggle with him.

*Correction: My mom has informed me that we did not actually buy the first snake. He was given to us as a gift from a colleague who heard that our dad had wanted to get us one before he passed away. This then was a very kind gift of a very kind snake.

*For those who haven’t seen The Princess Bride, ROUS stands for Rodent of Unusual Size, which inhabit the Fire Swamp, as well as the walls of my childhood in Melanesia.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

The Oldest Poem in the English Language

My wife bought me Leland Ryken’s The Soul in Paraphrase for a Father’s Day gift. It begins with this gem, the oldest extant poem in the English language, which is fittingly about creation. 

Now we must praise the Keeper of Heaven's Kingdom, 
The might of the Maker and his wisdom, 
The work of the Glory-Father, when he of every wonder, 
The eternal Lord, the beginning established. 

He first created for the sons of earth 
Heaven as a roof, Holy Creator, 
Then middle-earth the Protector of mankind, 
Eternal Lord, afterwards made, 
The earth for men, the Lord Almighty.

The poet is Caedmon, an illiterate English farmhand in the 600s who did not know how to sing. When he fell asleep one day in a barn, someone in a dream told him to sing. Caedmon protested that he did not know how, so the voice told him that he should sing about creation. When he awoke, Caedmon was able to sing this song. Ryken says, “The new poetic gift never left Caedmon. English poetry thus began with a miracle of the word.”

I enjoyed the unique titles that Caedmon uses to speak of God, the “Keeper of Heaven’s Kingdom,” the “Glory-Father,” the “Protector of mankind.” This is one of the advantages of being exposed to the worship of God in other languages or in an archaic form of your own language – different kinds of titles are possible and prominent (For example, Acts 1:24 in Greek calls God “Lord Heart-Knower”). I also noticed how the verbs come at the end of some of the sentences, an old trait of Indo-European languages that has also held on in the Indo-European language we are learning in Central Asia. And I always find it interesting whenever I come across an account from church history where the Holy Spirit communicates in dreams, a phenomenon quite common among those who come to faith in Central Asia. Strange as it might seem to us now, dreams are more common in our own spiritual lineage than we might think.

As I read, I wondered if this first poem of the English language also hints at some influence of Celtic Christianity, the main cultural source of English Christianity, with its Patrick-esque emphasis on the goodness of creation (See this post on St. Patrick’s Breastplate). Like creation, English poetry has since been abused and broken in many ways, but it sure had a good and beautiful beginning.

For the linguistically curious, here is “Caedmon’s Hymn” in Old English and in Bede’s Latin translation. 

Nū scylun hergan hefaenrīcaes Uard,
metudæs maecti end his mōdgidanc,
uerc Uuldurfadur, suē hē uundra gihwaes,
ēci dryctin ōr āstelidæ
hē ǣrist scōp aelda barnum
heben til hrōfe, hāleg scepen.
Thā middungeard moncynnæs Uard,
eci Dryctin, æfter tīadæ
firum foldu, Frēa allmectig.
Nunc laudare debemus auctorem regni caelestis,
potentiam creatoris, et consilium illius
facta Patris gloriae: quomodo ille,
cum sit aeternus Deus, omnium miraculorum auctor exstitit;
qui primo filiis hominum
caelum pro culmine tecti
dehinc terram custos humani generis
omnipotens creavit.

-Ryken, The Soul in Paraphrase, pp. 19-20

-Marsden, Old English Reader, p. 80

-Photo by Stephanie LeBlanc on Unsplash