Our roof seems to be home to an entire ecosystem. Besides the fact that we have enough grass up there to keep a goat, we get inklings of varied life-forms and mysterious goings-on that we can’t see — or see only when they spill over into our lower world.
An early visitor was the five-foot-long rat snake that made its way from the roof to our water heater closet. Then there are the raccoons, which sound as if they are constructing multiple-family lodgings above our bedrooms, and which on occasion have fallen onto the front porch or tumbled, quarreling, into the courtyard.
The latest intruders from the roof jungle have been highly unwelcome: a colony of fire ants. I had never heard of fire ant mounds on a roof, but these built their dwelling up against the second-floor bathroom skylight. Somehow they found tiny openings into the skylight itself. Since the ledge around the circumference is very narrow, however, their interior annex collapsed from time to time, casting dirt and ants onto the bathroom floor, where the ants would wander around looking dazed and biting the unsuspecting sister with whom they came into contact.
Several times, with the help of Sister Annette, I cleared them out as well as I could, then climbed up into the skylight to seal the seams with caulking — doing this by feel as I couldn’t se where the openings were, and hoping not to get stung in the process. With the third climb, I think I have finally thwarted the fire ants.
Yesterday I noticed a new invader from above — grass growing inside the skylight in soil brought in by the ants and deposited in a crevice I can’t reach. Eventually we will have to do something about the roof, before its function as border between indoors and outdoors is totally compromised.
Boundaries
In matters of the spirit, boundaries are not so clearly defined. We are accustomed to speaking in terms of the physical and the spiritual, but here the borders tend to be fluid. The denizens of one domain spill over into another like raccoons and fire ants, whether we want them to or not.
We are both spiritual and bodily creatures. Although the physical may often seem to us to pose a block to the spiritual, at times, and through grace, we become aware that it can provide a pathway to God — who after all is the one who created the physical world and called it good. The spiritual is not an intruder in the physical world as the snake was an intruder in the water heater closet, nor is the physical an intruder into the world of the spirit. They mingle comfortably, even if we are not always comfortable with their mingling.
Bearers of Mystery
The physical is in fact a bearer of Mystery. This may be most obvious to us in the sacramental elements of water and wine and bread, but our own bodies are also bearers of Mystery, suffused with the presence of God. This requires of us a reverence in our approach to the human body. It requires a humble trust when inevitably our bodies appear to fail us. For even in our weakness — and perhaps especially here — we come face to face with the incomprehensible mystery of ourselves and of the God of Jesus Christ, whose Spirit never ceases to work in us.
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (1 Corinthians 3:16)