On one of his first...
Illustration
Object:
On one of his first hospital visits in his first parish, Paul visited an old trapper named Jack. Jack was in for an emergency appendectomy. Unfortunately, Jack developed an infection and was in the hospital for an extended stay. This was to Paul’s delight, because Jack told pretty fantastic stories, like the one about the she wolf that Jack befriended. According to Jack, it was a particularly hard winter, bitterly cold with an unusually heavy amount of snow. The pickings were lean for Jack and for the wild animals. One day, as Jack was going to check his lines, a wolf came into the clearing where Jack’s cabin was located. She stood and looked at Jack, lay down, rolled onto her back in a submissive position, then got up and left. Jack didn’t know what to make of it. The next day, the wolf came back and repeated the strange practice. It did so each day for more than a week, each time coming closer and closer to the cabin and Jack. One day, Jack took some meat out and dropped it a few feet in front of him. The wolf crept up and took the meat. This was repeated for about a week, after which Jack held onto the meat and waited for the wolf to take it from his hand. Eventually, Jack could pet the wolf, who came each day for food. The hard winter had broken down the barriers that usually kept the feral wolf from the human. It wasn’t a permanent break, however. In the spring as the snow melted, the wolf disappeared. Then one day, it came back with three pups in tow. This time she stayed at the edge of the clearing, but she made sure Jack saw her pups. Then she was gone, never to return. Paul talks of how Christ broke down the walls that kept Gentiles and Jewish people apart, making one people of two. But unlike the harsh winter that broke the wall between wolf and human, Christ broke the wall down for all time.
