Before we even took one step on our walk this night, she observed our shadow, dancing on the barn building behind us, and she immediately began enthusiastically barking. I was confused at first about her outburst. Since we got her as a puppy from the pound in Bay City, I hadn’t heard her bark at anything, much. Since then I discovered that she barked at vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, brooms, and even my wife brushing her hair. Of course, she barks at other dogs – but that’s a story for another time.
When she starting barking in the twilight of the day, my first thought was that someone was coming. I looked for some intruder, but found no one. Then I saw the direction of her ire was aimed at the barn wall behind the house. The light from the house shown on the barn wall and our shadow played wonderfully black upon barn wall. When I discovered at what she was barking, I laughed out loud.
Then as we took our walk in the twilight of the day, I pondered what that might mean. And it seems to me, that we do a lot of barking at shadows in our own way. Anything we don’t understand, anything that is out of our comfort zone, anything that is different from how we do things, manages to get our ire.
I imagine that there will be a great hue and cry over the recent Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. As a minister of word and sacrament for almost 40 years, I wrestled with this issue often and hard. Now that I’m retired, I will let others wrestle with it.
Until recently, I thought marriage is between a man and a woman. I want gay people to have the same protections under the law that I do as a married man, just don’t call it marriage. But as I have heard many times since the decision came down, “love is love”, and it should be honored in whatever form it takes. Honoring gay marriage doesn’t demean marriage, but has the opportunity to show heterosexual couples how much marriage means to those it has been denied for so many years.
Barking at shadows is not just about whom we marry, but other areas of our living as well. One way we bark at shadows is in race relations. Our nation’s just buried nine people, including the pastor of an historic African-American church in Charlotte, North Carolina. As an old instructor of mine at Memorial Medical Center in Corpus Christi used to say, “We are more alike than we are different.”
Of course, such a thing is easy to say, but hard to make lasting change in how we view one another. Barking at shadows is not just for puppies. It’s something we all do. It helps, hopefully, to look at all the shadows in our lives, and instead of barking, embrace that darkness, making it more a part of who we are so we no longer have to bark, realizing that, as the Bible says, “perfect love casts out fear.”
Mark W Stoub is the author of “Blood Under the Altar,” and the sequel, “Fire in the Blood.” His column, “Goldie Walks,” are observations made while walking his dog, a Catahoula mix, named, Goldie.