My dog Mattie

My dog Mattie is a good old dog, maybe even a wise old dog. She has strong opinions about the hazards of children who scream when they are at play, or crouch in the shrubbery for hide and seek, or cats that yowl, or motorbikes for goodness sake. She barks.

Mattie is a big dog, a malamute/German shepherd sort of dog, beautiful and a little scary. I assure the children who want to tease her that they should be careful. If she gets too excited, she will jump the fence, and then where will they be? Some years ago, a group of teenage boys liked to throw rocks at her. I was so angry that I promised them that if I caught them I would open the gate and let her out. I think they believed me. I knew better. I wouldn’t take the chance that she might get hurt.

Mattie has lived at least eleven years in the shadow of the church. She hears the organ on Sunday morning, smells the turkey stew in the making, and barks at the children who prove their courage by running past the gate. Lately, for the past few months, maybe a year, she has had a problem with the church. The problem has nothing to do with noise. This is a visual, perhaps intellectual, problem, and she is mightily frustrated.

The church is a modest brick structure with beautiful stained glass windows, a pleasant church with a community closet and a food pantry in the basement. There is no steeple or bell tower, or bells for that matter, even recorded ones. There is a single, tall spire which serves the single purpose of supporting a cross of modest size. I haven’t studied the location of crosses on other churches, but this cross is the single highest point in the whole area, so high that I find it amazing that it is not regularly struck by lightning.

When Mattie barks that for-goodness-sake-come-and-fix-this kind of bark, I do eventually come to see what’s going on. There she is, with her eyes fixed on the heavens. I step outside so that I too can gaze at the heavens, and there they are. Black vultures! They usually hang out in the Scotts Creek Greenway, but they have come to roost on the cross.

I will admit that I laughed at first and thought that vultures roosting on the cross might be an appropriate symbol for Christians who do not follow the teachings of their resurrected Lord. Later, I thought that vultures on the cross were historically appropriate since the cross was used for open-air torture and executions throughout the Middle East. Mind you, I don’t think the New Testament says anything about vultures. We don’t hear much about birds in Jerusalem except for the doves that were routinely sacrificed in the temple.

As a scholar in medieval literature, I spent a lot of time with the teachings of the medieval church. That would be the Roman church, and the teachings written by those who could write for those who could read were not available to most believers. The ordinary folk who could neither read nor write were taught by images, symbols that illustrated the central concerns of the church. I tend to think that way myself, and so does Mattie, I guess, since she is simply aghast at what she sees on that cross. She pays no attention to vultures on rooftops, or in trees, or vultures feeding on the ground so we know the birds themselves are not the problem.

The use of the cross as a symbol predated the Christian church by many centuries. While it sometimes referred to pagan religions, it did not usually signify the execution of a god. Crucifixion was reserved for the worst and most wretched of poor criminals and traitors. It was used as an instrument of torture and wholesale executions long before it was claimed by the Christians.

The cross became a safe and popular symbol of the Christian faith when Constantine the Great was converted to Christianity in the 4th century. He is credited with prohibiting its use as an instrument of execution in the whole of the Roman empire.

We are accustomed to the use of small white crosses along the highways to mark the place where someone has died. We are accustomed to the enormous fields of white crosses in military cemeteries. We are not accustomed to the twenty-one crosses in Uvalde, Texas with the names of nineteen children and their teachers. Those crosses will live in our minds as a monument to sorrow and to shame. And so should they all.