Shepherding Salamanders

A [reposted] sermon on abundant life, slow violence, and the lie of "collateral damage."

I preached this sermon last year, when it felt like every time I opened Instagram I saw photos and videos of dead children in Gaza. And amid the “extensive strikes” on the Gaza Strip once again bearing witness to massacres through my phone, I was reminded of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s story…

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On a dark, foggy night in March 2003, a small group led by indigenous author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer scoured the asphalt of a rural highway for yellow spotted salamanders.

These underground dwellers emerge from their year-long dormancy from under logs with the spring’s first warm rains. They wait for the cover of darkness and the spring rain keeps their skin moist. They’re all situated about half a mile from the base of a valley, the woods acting as a funnel from the watershed straight to the water. The salamanders are all pointed the same direction: the pool where they were born, and where they in turn will now reproduce. Though there may be other ponds and pools on the way, they do not stop their journey into the valley until they arrive at their birthplace, finding the exact location through a precise reading of the lines in the earth’s magnetic field.

Photo by Andy Køgl on Unsplash

The small group wielded flashlights in search of salamanders, not because they wanted to witness the spectacle of the mass migration, but because standing between the salamanders and their pond was a highway. Frogs and toads take only fifteen seconds to cross the road. The spotted salamander can take up to two minutes, dragging its tender belly, made for sliding over smooth wet leaves, over rough asphalt. The salamanders evaded predators, endured freezing winters in near total solitude, but they now face their biggest threat: the cars that go speeding by, unaware of the glistening spectacle beneath them. So, this small group worked as quickly as they could to shepherd the salamanders to safety.

Then, a column of headlights appears over the horizon. They have just enough time to grab one more soft black body in each hand and race to the edge of the highway. The cars rush past, their drivers unaware of what is occurring just outside the barrier of their vehicle. As Kimmerer writes:

“From inside the car, listening to late-night radio, you just don’t know. But standing on the roadside, you can hear the pop of the body, hear the moment when a glistening being following magnetic trails toward love is reduced to red pulp on the pavement. We try to work faster, but there are so many, and we are so few.”

Earlier in the evening, she’d been listening to the news reporting that the bombing of Baghdad had begun. The level of collateral damage, they said, is still unknown.

The term collateral damage emerged during the Vietnam War, intended as a euphemism for civilian casualty and has since become entrenched in US military jargon. It has even become codified in international law as an accepted reality of war. Collateral damage, Kimmerer writes are “shielding words to keep us from naming the consequences of a missile gone astray. The words ask us to turn our faces away, as if man-made destruction were an inescapable fact of nature. Collateral damage: measured in overturned soup pots and wailing children.”

As the salamander rescue efforts continue, a familiar pickup truck speeds past. Kimmerer recognizes one of her neighbors who owns a dairy farm up the road. She imagines his thoughts were far away from the salamanders that night, “straining toward Baghdad,” where his son was stationed. His son, a kid who once drove tractors through these same streets, is now driving tanks across the world. The scene of devastation laid before his son and the scene of destruction lying beneath his pickup truck’s tires might appear unrelated. But for Kimmerer in that moment, the edges of we consider “collateral damage” seem to blur:

“The carnage on this dark country road and the broken bodies on the streets of Baghdad do seem connected…Salamanders, children, young farmers in uniform – they are not the enemy or the problem. We have not declared war on these innocents, and yet they die just as surely as if we had. They are all collateral damage. If it is oil that sends the sons to war, and oil that fuels the engines that roar down this hollow, then we are all complicit, soldiers, civilians, and salamanders connected in death by our appetite for oil.”

How can one be a good shepherd when your sheep are written off as collateral damage? What does abundant life mean in a world where we accept collateral damage as a necessary condition of our freedom?

Kimmerer’s work on this night, I think, has something important to teach us about what it means to be the good shepherd.

In Psalm 23, we hear, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want….Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me.”

Here are these salamanders, struggling mightily to head down into the valley arrive at their home pond, dragging their soft bodies through a literal valley of the shadow of death. And here is this small ragtag group on the side of the road, rushing back and forth along the highway to deliver the salamanders to abundant life.

What does it mean to have life and to have it abundantly? We can look to the Hebrew Bible’s critique of the “bad shepherds,” to clarify what abundant life does not look like: “You have not strengthened the weak, healed the sick, bound up the injured, brought back the strayed, sought the lost. They became food for the wild animals.” Or, perhaps today we could say: “They became collateral damage, crushed under the weight of our machines of war.”

At the outset of Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptizer sees Jesus and exclaims: “Behold, the Lamb of God!” But here, just a few chapters later, Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd. Somehow, Jesus identifies as both the lamb and the shepherd.

Being in Lent, we’re about to witness one example of what it looks like for the shepherd and the lamb to trade places. In laying down his life for the sake of the sheep, Jesus became the sacrificial lamb, an expression of solidarity with the most vulnerable in our midst.

The philosopher Rene Girard details how humanity has imagined sacrifice throughout human history. The sacrifice is a kind of scapegoat, creating an outlet for latent social tensions, channeling that violence toward a being that does not deserve it as a means of protecting the rest of the community from its own violence. The sacrifice, then, gathers up that violence and that violence is realized in a single surrogate target: the scapegoat.

The sacrificial lamb is the collateral damage of our supposed propensity toward violence.

The sacrificial lamb is the collateral damage supposedly necessary for our salvation.

And that kind of thinking is exactly what the resurrection refuses.

To believe in the resurrection is to categorically refuse the idea that any being can be reduced to collateral damage. To believe resurrection is to be believe that all – not some – are meant to have life and have it abundantly and that no being should be sacrificed in order for some to have abundant life.

When the lamb was resurrected, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we became the body of Christ. We became the hands and feet of the shepherd. Just as Jesus is both the lamb and the shepherd, so too are we.

God is our shepherd, yes.

And.

In Matthew 25, we hear: when I was hungry you gave me food, when I was thirsty you gave me drink, when I was in prison, you visited me, when I was a stranger, you welcomed me. Whatever you’ve done for the least of these, you’ve done for me. God is our shepherd.

And.

When we stand with the least of these, when we promote abundant life for the most vulnerable among us, we shepherd God.

What can we learn from the way that God shepherds us about what it means for us to shepherd God, all those created in God’s image?

Hear again in Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

The rod and the staff evoke for us the dangers of the wilderness. The rod fends off predators like wolves and the shepherd’s staff is for rescuing sheep trapped in thickets or crevasses. The shepherd both shields its flock from what seeks violence and rescues the sheep when necessary.

For us to more fully imagine what it means for us to be good shepherds, we might return to the salamanders. Perhaps the predators are the cars barreling down the road. The staff, rather than plucking sheep out of thickets, is for picking up the salamanders and gently placing them in safety on the other side of the road. The shepherd, in one sense, keeps the sheep alive.

But there’s more to abundant life than immediate survival. There’s also living life in fullness and dignity, and the salamanders have something to teach us of that as well.

Amphibians breathe through their skin, with little ability to filter out toxins. They absorb the pollutants in the air and water, the heavy metals, the synthetic hormones, and forever plastics that infiltrate wetlands. Their bodies are forever marked by the evidence of our addiction to convenience. As Kimmerer writes, “Subject to habitat loss as wetlands and forests disappear, amphibians are the collateral damage we blindly accept as the cost of development.” They are the sacrificial lambs of a different kind of collective violence; a violence we don’t often recognize as violent, but life-destroying nevertheless.

Human bodies, too, bear the weight of slow violence. Rob Nixon’s book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor details how violence wrought by the climate disaster takes places gradually and often invisibly. Slow violence occurs, he writes: occurs “gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” The area around St. James Louisiana, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, for example, is called “cancer alley.” There are 150 chemical plants located along this stretch of the Mississippi River, and the primarily Black residents of this stretch of the country have described living in this area as like living on death row.

What is our rod and our staff when the most vulnerable bodies among us bear the weight of this slow violence? What does abundant life look like when so many of us still believe collateral damage is the cost of doing business, necessary for our freedom and salvation?

Maybe our rod is identifying and fighting back against systems of capital that insist some bodies must be sacrificed through their labor and lives for the good of the whole. Maybe our staff is creating social safety nets, collectively lifting each other out of the asphalt and brambles and rivers those who have been trampled and trapped by systems beyond their control.

To be the good shepherd is to disavow ourselves of the premise that in order to secure abundant life for some, “other sheep” must be sacrificed as collateral damage. To be the good shepherd is to categorically refuse the idea that any being – human or other-than-human – could be reduced to “collateral damage.” To be the good shepherd is to protect and nourish the sheep and salamanders alike for the sake of a life of dignity, a life abundant in dignity, beauty and love.

As Kimmerer drove back home that night on the highway shepherding salamanders to safety, she listened to more war news on the radio:

“Columns of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles are advancing over the Iraqi countryside, through a sandstorm as dense as the fog that shrouds us here. I wonder what is crushed beneath them as they pass.

As the temperature drops, single voices – clear and hollow – replace the keening chorus: the ancient speech of frogs. One word becomes clear, as if spoken in English. “Hear! Hear! Hear! The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family. Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation.”

‘Hear!’ calls a peeper in the headlight.

‘Hear!’ calls a young man trapped in a tank far from home.

‘Hear!’ calls a mother whose home is now a burnt-out ruin.

There must be an end to this.

By the time I get home it is late and I cannot sleep, so I walk up the hill to the pond behind my house. Here too the air is ringing with their calls. I want to…wash away the sadness….[But] there should be no washing away tonight; better to wear the grief like a sodden coat.

‘Weep! Weep!’ calls a toad from the water’s edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”