Mentors with Four Legs or Fewer
Chris Townley has been a trusted friend, accomplice, colleague, and pastor for over a decade, faithfully engaging in the good, hard work of justice and community building. As Erin confidently affirms, "He’s the only White man I trust." We are honored to have him serve on our Board of Advisors for BLK South. Learn More
Before Erin and Kendall let me know the theme for this round of reflections, I had been working on an essay. The essay engaged themes of mentorship, elders, and prayer. And deer.
It seemed fitting to offer a snippet of that essay, since BLK South is looking at the theme of “mentors,” and then I’ll expound a bit more on my experience with mentorship. Here’s a glimpse into that essay:
Behold, a seam is coming loose.
You thought it was the thread that held you together but it is unraveling to set you free.
Many a spiritual hero have let us down, the reasons as plentiful as snowflakes in a blizzard. And just as blinding. They were never meant to hold us. They were never meant to carry the power of determining what could or couldn’t be contained within the boundless universe of belief. So it should not have come as a surprise that I was given a side-eye glance from an Evangelical elder when I confessed I had been praying for the deer who roamed the fields and roadsides between my home and the church office.
He did not shun me, not at first nor for this reason, but he also did not berate me. Each of these might have been preferred to his unwillingness to inquire. Perhaps he did want to probe, maybe he did want to open up the recesses of his own boundaried prayer life. Maybe the boundaries had been drawn long ago, slick as the ruled line of an engineer’s pencil. Maybe they were drawn the moment he shot his first doe as a small town teenage boy and witnessed the life trickle from her eyes, eyes that even without life in them were seeing him. Maybe he had prayed in that moment, on his knees, hands resting on the fur of his first kill, and he knew he’d done something. What that something was, regardless of one’s view on hunting, had been tapped, like a root long hidden beneath the hard ground of his prayers and on the morning when I surprised him with my confession it vibrated like buried memories sometimes do. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on him.
Yet now I know I value curiosity from my spiritual elders, none of which are fit to be heroes.
Heroes are found among the deer who have dodged the death dealing wrought by vehicular warfare, pump action rifles, high definition scopes. Bounding so, bent on survival, but still bounding. A vision of joy and enduring. To think of all the years they lived in a roadless world, a motor free society. They were here, and there, before we paved our way through their homeland, shooting out a clearing for the construction. And so, in the early stages of praying for the deer between my home and the church office, I merely whispered:
Keep us safe.
The us a subtle acknowledgement of an intertwined relationship, a glimpse of something glowing on the horizon. The prayer was a squint.
Wild animals thriving in a protected forest.
The struggle with mentors is tied to the rate at which we change, transform. Or another way I reflect on the mentors in my life is that many of them have come and gone, like a season. This is not a bad thing, I’ve learned. In my experience one of the challenges to mentorship has been in those seasons when the leaders who love somehow feel threatened by the worlds expanding within me. In the excerpt above, in the movement of my increasing sensitivity to the whole of creation, I have encountered the end of a seasonal mentorship when one relinquished their curiosity and care. As a friend of mine notes, there should be an 18 letter German word to describe such a sensation, for it is that complex.
I’ve also encountered the end of seasonal mentorships as my Spiritual expansion moved me toward the margins (stories of which I have shared here and will share in the future). However, even in mid-reflection, the inverse is also true. As one season of mentorship met its demise, a new one was resurrected. What I’ve found in the last decade or so is that much of my most beloved mentorship has been mutual. Even as Kendall wrote last week, naming me a mentor, the truth of that relationship, regardless of the age difference, is that we learned and grew together. Co-mentoring. The same is true when I describe co-pastoring with Erin at Kaleo. She mentored me, pastored me (still does!), but not in the way we tend to think of mentorship as an old sage offering advice (although Kendall might think of me as old ;)).
Beyond these co-mentoring relationships, of which there are many profound ones active in my life (I wish I could name you all!), I found mentorship in the words of spiritual guides like Howard Thurman, Mister Rogers, bell hooks, Oscar Romero, Sallie McFague, and Wendall Berry. Blending the closeness of friendship with mentorship from afar, the teaching and writing of Randy Woodley, and AJ Swoboda, has impacted me since my days as their seminary student. Things get a little more complicated as I identify other mentors as Clare of Assisi, Francis of Assisi, and Jesus.
The link in all of this brings me back to the deer. The type of mentorship I always longed for, the type I needed, I describe at the end of my essay like this:
What I was still lacking, what I really needed, was what my friend Andrew called, “another clunky conversion.” The kind of conversion where I could begin to receive both land and animal as, according to this friend, “my spiritual and created sibling.” And in order for such a conversion to take shape, I needed, somehow, some way, “to cough up the bile of dominance, the flinch that these siblings are spiritless objects of my consumption,” detrimental to the smoothness of uninhibited travel.
The clunkiness is what I cannot locate. Like the awkward moment of a bungled hug that became a handshake then became a hug. It happened in a flawed instant drawn across a span of years, none are left to shoulder the blame for the clunky connection because the creational hug heals all.
Conversions, I was taught, were supposed to be the kind of things that come with a date. Write it inside the cover of your Bible. How did this happen? How did this transformation take place? Unable to remember how it happened, but remembering a multiyear reciprocal embrace, one day I found myself praying for the livelihood of the deer. It was as if something occurred in my sleep, a type of spiritual osmosis, and the next morning, a morning I also cannot remember, the deer was my friend. Worthy of my hugs, close enough to feel, related. The deer was a sibling, a full-spirited member of the community of creation with me.
I wrote the date on the pages of the first Bible. Blowing in the arms of the breeze, behold, I was free.
My mentors are full-bodied beings, friends, siblings. Some of them are two-legs, and some of them are four-legs. And all of them are dirt.
I’ve found the best way to identify such mentors is to seek out those who’ve been grimed by the realities of life, and still they continue to shine, to flourish, to lead the way. Imitate such members of the community of creation, whether they are deer or the Dooleys or dead. We all have much to learn together.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
Who are your mentors at this stage of your life and why?
Who do you need to reach out to and thank for mentoring you? Who do you need to reach out to and request that they mentor you?
R E C O M M E N D E D R E A D I N G
