The Bible is mostly a collection of profound myths: unreal stories that can help us see what it is real, and see what we really need to change.
One of these wonderful biblical myths is the story of Balaam and his donkey in the book of Numbers in the Hebrew Scriptures. The people of Israel are wandering around in the desert with Moses on their way to the Promised Land. And they are making the people who live in the desert very nervous. Will they conquer their lands? The people in the desert land of Moab saw them coming and decided to get a diviner from Syria, a guy by the name of Balaam, to come and put a curse on the Israelites. He told them, sure, I’ll work for you, but I’m a professional witch doctor. I only do stuff that I am told to do, or allowed to do, by the spirits. So off he went on his donkey to meet up with the leaders of Moab.
But on his way, the God of Israel sent an angel to block his path. Balaam didn’t see the angel, but the donkey did. When the donkey stopped in front of the angel, Balaam kept hitting it. Until God made the donkey talk! And chew out Balaam for hitting him when all the donkey was doing was obeying divine orders – which is what Balaam was supposed to do!
I love this dialogue in the story: “Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and it said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” Balaam said to the donkey, “Because you have made a fool of me! I wish I had a sword in my hand! I would kill you right now!” But the donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all your life to this day? Have I been in the habit of treating you this way?””
Balaam was so deafened by his anger that instead of being left speechless by his donkey’s speech, he immediately argued with the donkey instead. Then the donkey replied in a perfectly reasonable manner. Saying, in effect, do you suppose I’m any old donkey, a generic donkey, somebody else’s donkey? A rental donkey? Come on, man, we have a relationship, right? I wouldn’t just stop in the middle of the road for no reason?
That donkey was definitely not a dumb ass!
Roberta and I have two donkeys, and we can attest to the fact that they follow orders from sources that we know nothing about. Because they sure don’t follow our orders! Some say donkeys are stubborn, but really they’re just smart. They do what makes sense for them to do, not what makes sense for us for them to do. I go out and look at them doing what they do, and stand in awe at the gap between their consciousness and my own.
Lately there’s a lot of talk about aliens and UFO’s. Seems like the subject bubbles up into the public awareness on a regular basis. What do you think? Seems like in my lifetime it has resurfaced as a thing every decade or so.
Meanwhile, alien intelligence surrounds us every day. We confabulate about strange beings zipping around us in flying saucers, while all around us are alien beings that think thoughts and have experiences that are far beyond our comprehension. UFO’s – Unimaginable Feeling Organisms.
We call them animals.
We humans assume that we know more than them, since we can read and write and do calculus and they cannot. But of course animals know stuff that humans can’t. Dogs have 40 times more scent receptor cells than humans do. We can’t begin to conceive of the experiences they have as a result. They might have complex olfactory sensations as sublime for them as listening to a symphony is for us. Birds see and smell stuff that we can’t. Honeybirds are a kind of bird that will intentionally lead humans to beehives that humans can’t detect, so that the humans will empty the hive of its honey and leave the wax for the birds to eat. When I heard about these birds recently, I was totally blown away.
Some birds can see ultraviolet light that human eyes can’t detect. And their visual acuity is much greater than ours. If they could feel sorry for us humans, surely they would, because of our pitifully weak eyesight.
Once I was on a hike on a trail next to a cliff. Above me I heard dirt falling down the cliff face, and looked up – and there was a raven, watching the dirt fall down. After the dirt stopped falling, the raven scratched the earth at the top of the cliff and made more dirt fall down. The raven watched it fall all the way down. And then did it again. There did not appear to be any practical purpose for the raven to be doing this. It appeared that the raven was playing. Doing what I used to do when I was a kid. And what I’ve done as an adult, truth be told – tossing stuff off cliffs just to see what happens! But what do I know? What was happening in that bird’s brain is hard for my brain to fully conceive.
So that ancient made-up story, the myth of Balaam and the donkey, awakens us to this reality that animals have intelligence – and even possibly a spirituality - that humans do not, and that we do well to stay humble about our own intelligence as a consequence.
When we got our donkeys, we were given a small library of books about these noble creatures. Almost all of these books were sappy tales of how donkeys relate to humans in a human way. How they have feelings and emotions like ours. But I’m pretty much convinced that our donkeys are doing their lives their way, and not ours. They feel, they emote, but in ways profoundly different than we do. This doesn’t mean we can’t interact with them and connect with them and become bonded with each other. But to assume they bond with me in the same way I bond with them is, I think, disrespectful. For me, the differences between us are invitations to show awe and deference toward them.
As the prophet said on behalf of God in Isaiah 55: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth. So are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
We should not assume that our ways and thoughts are higher than the ways of donkeys. Rather, we should humble ourselves before the Cosmic Consciousness beyond that of ourselves and of donkeys.
And this humility can move us to treat all living beings with respect and kindness as much as possible. When a species of animal goes extinct because of human-caused climate change, we have wiped out a uniquely precious and amazing kind of consciousness. Who knows what kinds of angels can be seen by each and every kind of creature on earth? Who knows what messages they receive, messages that could be useful to us?
May our relationships with animals, whether in the wild or in our living rooms, humble us into an awe-filled awareness of how much more there is to experience than we are able to know. May our humility be a divine way of touching the untouchable, smelling the unsmellable, hearing the unhearable, seeing the unseeable – just enough to awaken us to the vastness of the potential experiences that surround us. Amen!