There are lizards everywhere. When you are walking down the sidewalk downtown it’s like parting the Red Sea with all the scampering as they clear the way.
At church last week I commented on them to the police officer who watches over us and it was clear he’d already dealt with them.
It’s a strange relationship, this dance with the lizards. You watch them rush to hunker down like humans in the path of a storm, and if you catch a glimpse of yourself in them, you feel bad for interrupting them.
“Sorry, I’ll be out of the way in no time,” you would say if they could speak.
I would like to think they would respond kindly.
But at the same time you wonder if you should avoid contact altogether so they don’t get the wrong idea if you get chummy with them and then decide you have to call an exterminator.
(I will say, there’s nothing worse than a backstabber, so I would recommend you decide where you stand on the matter before you go downtown again, just so you know how to act.)
Lizards, at First Baptist especially, are on sketchy ground. After all, their cousin, the snake, is infamous in Christian theology as the embodiment of The Satan, the fallen angel-lord Lucifer.
But boy did they miss the memo.
No wonder I’m torn.
I’m not sure if we’re enemies or if they will hold it against me that their cousins form a (very) negative strategic point in my theology.
I want them to feel welcome, and I certainly don’t want to step on any, but I’m not sure they should get too welcome, just in case.
Every so often you’ll find a lizard with half a tail, and your thoughts will be directed toward it, wondering if he lost it honorably.
Sometimes he’ll linger, just before dashing into the bushes, and you’ll get to ask him what happened. If he responds, I’d refer you to a good psychiatrist friend of mine, but assuming you don’t hear him audibly, you’ll find in his lidless eyes something very important.
Experience.
His tail is growing back, because somehow they do that, and he is recovering from a run-in with the law, the shoe, the stray cat, or the curious bird.
You’ll often find he’s the last one to dart into the bushes, which is odd. Of all the lizards to run from danger, you’d think the one most harmed by danger would be the most averse to it.
But lizards aren’t like humans.
They don’t really hunker down good.
Even when they run away, they’re still in plain sight, just hunkering, doing the plain-sight-hunker, a lizard specialty that involves push-ups to intimidate and confuse the predator.
Lizard wisdom doesn’t manifest itself as a running from risk.
Lizard wisdom is simpler.
When I walk through the lizard alley, I see them and think, and I even sometimes carry on conversations with them.
But when they see me, they get just safe enough away that they can make a run for it, but not so far away that they let go of their progress in the sidewalk.
That discernment is what I hope they all have, what I hope proves me innocent, my shoes friendly as I tromp through our shared habitat.
But no matter what I do (or think), the lizards will always be a strategic point in my theology, a troubling paradox in my study of risk, and a voiceless conversation with my path down the sidewalk.
The lizard would say that no matter what storms we face, if we get just safe enough away that we have the option to hunker and the option to continue, we too can thrive—even in a concrete jungle.
The discernment of the lizard: now that’s something you don’t see everyday.