Don't Fence Me In....

Junie B. Jones came home last night. I wept and laughed and giggled and sniffled all night long. She jumped off the horse trailer, stood and surveyed the barking basset hounds, Barney, Susan, Dianne and her mother, my mama, Vince and Tina with a calm interest and then began grazing on the clover. She is a small Morgan horse, black with a white blaze on her face and three white socks. Susan found her poorly tended in a field and bought her for her children. They have grown up and have other interests now so Junie B. needed a new home. Daddy is laughing in heaven. His sixty one year old daughter finally has her horse.
As Michael and I lay in bed this morning, remembering and savoring Junie B.’s coming home to us, we each had memories of childhood freedom and power experienced with horses. As a little boy, Michael visited a friend’s uncle who had horses... big horses. The boys saddled up and played cowboys and Indians in the pasture, racing and running the horses with no helmets and no adult supervision, just their imaginations and the wild, wonderful freedom that comes with childhood. My "a-ha" moment was the realization that my dad, overprotective to a fault, lifted my nine year old self up into the western saddle on Brownie, a big quarter horse, handed me the reins and let me go. He didn’t walk the horse holding the bridle, gave no anxious instruction, just showed me how to use the reins and sent me off into the pasture on my own where I fell in love with Brownie and horseback riding. For Michael and me, those memories are still clear and strong fifty some odd years later. I pondered the strength of my life long longing for a horse of my own and am beginning to understand what this dream has meant to me.
When I first sat in that clunky western saddle on top of the world, Brownie’s back, it was an exhilarating exercise in freedom with power. I was in charge ( more or less). I was alone on top of that big old horse in the middle of the pasture where no one could see us. For a child, especially my father’s daughters, this was a moment frozen in time. I was trusted, set free, given the reins and let go. All too soon I was back in my father’s house, that brief experience of self determination a memory that formed an important part of my being. Now I am beginning to appreciate and understand how this relationship with Brownie has informed not only my life but my soul.
As a child I learned the lessons of pleasing adults all too well. I truly wanted to make everyone around me happy and did not often let my inside self scream or yell or weep or laugh much less my outside self. It was too scary. Keeping daily life calm and peaceful, however I could, became a value for me. But somewhere in my soul, the feeling of flying on Brownie’s galloping feet, nurtured the wildness in me.
Contrary to popular opinion, all Baptists were not fundamentalists. For most of my life there was a wild streak in our denomination... room for a liberal Christian Life Commission, women deacons and preachers, theologically astute seminaries, people of faith who marched to a syncopated beat that provided a descant to the denominational norm. Baptists were all about the priesthood of the believers and there was room at the table for us all. So I could go to conventions and find not only others who shared my particular wildness but programs that had a little wiggle room. I learned to value the soul freedom that was a shared denominational value during that brief time. We had Carlyle Marney and Clarence Jordan, powerful preachers and powerful prophets who led the way to new freedom and justice. Henley Barnett, a seminary professor whom I was priviliged to call friend, worked in the Haymarket, a troubled, poor part of Louisville, Kentucky long before "peace and justice" were a part of our religious language . His wife contracted tuberculosis there and died. He was riding a bicycle to work, his elbows hanging out of the holes in his sweater, years before any concerns about the environment surfaced in the popular culture. Pitts Hughes and other women like her, denied full participation in the male dominated seminary, attended a training school next door to the seminary and refused to be ignored. They made their way into full expression of their call from God and were beacons of hospitality and courage for generations of us who needed foremothers and forefathers. So I learned some lessons in wildness and wild-erness early in my life.
My life experience growing up and as a Baptist gave me an appreciation, a need for room to run. Don’t tell me what I ought to believe, what language to use, which hymns are theologically sound, who to love, or judge me because I am not marching to your drum beat. Give me some room to run. Talk to me, listen to me, share your story with me, hear my story, love me and let me love you. Be my sister or brother in God’s family and cut me some slack. I’ll return the favor. Like Junie B.and Brownie, we all need the loving touch that comes from God through the skin face people of God who surround us.
"Write the vision; make it plain upon the tablets, so he/she may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end- it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay". Habakkuk 2:2-3 My vision... room for us all to run, differences known and celebrated because we are all still horses... Morgans, Arabians, Quarterhorses, Belgians, Paso Finas, stallions, mares and geldings, thoroughbreds and nags, UCC, Baptists, Catholics, Buddhists, Church of God, Lutherans, Muslims, liberals, moderates and fundamentalists alike, all God’s children loved equally because of our differences not in spite of them. I’ll run along side you and we will run the race together as we head towards the finish line. If you stumble, I’ll wait for you. If I fall, you will help me up. We run with different gaits but we are all running to God.
Thanks be to God for the wonderful world that has so many variations in color and size and kind and language. How much fun it can be to live in harmony with trots and gallops and walks and canters. Help me learn to run and ride in rythmn as I race home to you, O God. Thank you for not fencing me in. Peggy