When calves eat the leaves off the trees . . .

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Metis infantryman in the trenches of Batoche - Diarama at Batoche


The fortified city stands desolate,
an abandoned settlement, forsaken like the wilderness;
    there the calves graze,
    there they lie down;
    they strip its branches bare.
When its twigs are dry, they are broken off
    and women come and make fires with them.
For this is a people without understanding;
    so their Maker has no compassion on them,
    and their Creator shows them no favor. (Isaiah 27: 10-11, NIV)

The book of Isaiah has provided essential material for the Christian faith, including for the scribes and scholars who put the New Testament to print. As is so often the case when scriptures are understood as ancient oracles rather than as parables, Isaiah has been read as predictive of Christ’s coming, even of end times. My tendency is to see Isaiah as as story that illuminates the human condition, gives reason for hope in difficult times.

Take 27:10 & 11. Poetically, metaphorically the writer paints a vivid picture of the sequence of decline and destruction of a culture and a people. It’s Jerusalem after the Babylonian armies carried off the bulk of the leadership, academia of that city in a pernicious strategy for subduing it. Leaderless, the remnant is lost: the calves roam unattended looking for food, they eat the leaves and the tender ends of the boughs and twigs of remaining trees, the desparate trees dry up and the women break off the twigs and branches for firewood to keep warm. But for what? Little is left to them beyond the faint hope that their God will destroy their enemies in the end and Jerusalem and Judah province will be restored to their former glory.

People around the world have experienced similar devastation, are experiencing it today. It’s desperation at the limits, the point at which you kill and eat the chickens because the eggs aren’t enough to feed your family, the point at which you chop up your front porch and your furniture to stave off freezing to death, the point at which you burn your scriptures for one more desperate degree of warmth.

Starvation, desolation do bad things to our minds and our bodies. Comes a time when we throw up our hands because nothing makes sense anymore. The conclusion that the one who created us has lost interest in us is almost inevitable. “ . . . their Maker has no compassion on them, and their Creator shows them no favor.” Echoes of Jesus’ cry on the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Are we to read this as prophetic? Of course, but not in the ancient oracle sense, rather in the parable sense, a sense which requires an engagement among reason, experience and imagination. Our use of the word prophecy as prediction really does prophetic literature a disservice because it stifles our imaginative search for better outcomes and resigns us to the sighing “Que sera, sera.” The Babylonian exile will never happen again in the same way, but the story of that experience read in the reality of our present can act both as warning and as incentive to creative thought and planning.

Can we today recognize when the calves are eating the leaves off the trees? Have we striven to understand what’s going on in our cultures, in our humanity? Or will the creator lose interest in us because we haven’t made the effort to understand, to benefit from the past and the prophetic stories of, for instance, Isaiah, and Shakespeare, and Margaret Atwood, and David Suzuki, and Bernie Sanders, and Bruxy Cavey, and . . .?


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