Foxholes, Bird Nests

 

to the edge of the known world

The long-serving rector of our parish church has just retired, and as the search for a permanent successor is by design a careful and time-consuming one, the wardens have been charged with putting together a roster of visitors and local retired clergy to conduct the weekly services—the clerical equivalents of substitute teachers.  The lot fell to Joan for last week and next.  It has been quite a while since I saw her working on a sermon.   “What are the texts?” I asked—meaning, of course, the appointed Bible readings around which the sermon might be constructed.  “Foxes and holes, birds and nests,” she replied.  There are several choices, and her tone of voice suggested that was one she would probably not choose.  I knew what she was referencing, of course, a passage in which Jesus says, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath nowhere to lay his head.  Funnily enough, I myself have spent a certain amount of my recent time thinking about foxholes and bird nests, and in very different contexts.

The past week or ten days have seen our first really warm summer days as well as a significant amount of rain, some of it heavy.  The result in open woodlands has been what I call the Great Greening, in which the more gentle and subtle verdant shades of spring are overwhelmed by darker greens of a rampant, undisciplined character, leaving the impression of forest half yielding to jungle.  The fast-growing-vines—especially the porcelain berry that I wrote about some weeks ago—are particularly prominent.  Serious Summer is on the way, Serious Summer with its many pleasures but also its challenges and discomforts.

I usually think of the fieldstone wall at the bottom of our yard as an architectural decoration; but in Serious Summer it takes on the nature of a protective barrier, like Hadrian’s Wall or the fortified bridge of Conway Castle, dividing the world of safety and civility from a terrible landscape where dragons roam.  And while we don’t have any actual dragons, we do have in abundance most of the other critters of the Jersey fields and woods: deer, squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons,  ’possums, and an increasing number of foxes.  Bears and coyotes have been reported in or at least around Princeton, but I have yet to see them.  The foxes, on the other hand, are now commonplace.  Several times I have seen a fox lithely walking along the top of the whole length of the stone wall as though it were a private vulpine highway.  There was a special reason for the path of this particular fox trot, and I shall come to it eventuallly.

One of the principal objects of my scholarly research in Medieval Studies was the cultural history of the medieval Franciscan Order.  Francis is called the poverello (poor man) because of his commitment to evangelical poverty, the belief, based in a certain reading of the gospels that neither Jesus Christ nor his disciples owned any property.  This was regarded as the perfect (meaning “complete,” “having reached the highest possible level”) stage of spiritual life.  The doctrine of voluntary self-pauperization was usually called evangelical poverty—and it was regarded as morally superior to (and not really having much to do with)  what we usually think of as poverty.  There are many gospel passages in which the friars found this doctrine, but especially in Jesus’s reply to a man who asked him what he must do to be perfect.  The answer: “Sell everything you have; give the proceeds to poor people; and follow me.”  This the questioner could not do, because he had a lot of things.  Ah, yes, rich men, the eyes of needles.  And if this was a problem for a single rich man, what of a burgeoning new religious order with dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of partisans of “evangelical poverty” who did, however, need to be clothed, housed, and fed?  The conflict between literary reality and somber material necessity instigated a major rift within the Franciscan Order and a sustained polemic from conservative monastics of the Benedictine tradition, most of who lived simply but in comfortably endowed digs often supported by revenue-producing farmland.  The friars were also often in conflict with the so-called “secular clergy”—that is, the ordinary parish priests, who might find themselves in unwelcome competition with the new-fangled itinerant monastics, who were becoming as numerous and noxious as “flies and fleas.”  The debate was to a degree a battle of Bible verses, the passage about the Son of Man lacking even the domestic amenities of foxes and birds being a favorite of the more radical friars.  But their opponents could also turn it against them.  The birds came out unscathed.  Who doesn’t like birds?  Francis himself preached to them.  But not the foxes.  Foxes already had a folkloristic reputation for cunning and trickery.  Furthermore, with their reddish-brown coats they looked rather like a certain brand of friars—Franciscans.  So foxes and friars were an almost inevitable literary coupling, the most prominent survival being perhaps the folklore of Reynard the Fox.  I think it is likely that at one level Chaucer’s hilarious tale of the rooster Chaunticleer is an ecclesiastical allegory about the competition between friars and secular priests

 cock and fox

 

vulpes et gallus
 

It is fascinating to note how deeply our earlier artistic traditions in painting and literature, both popular and learned, reflect images derived from scriptural exegesis.  Because of a detail in Jesus’s commission to his disciples (Mark 6.9), the friars called themselves “them that carry no purse.”  But one disciple did carry a purse: Judas, as Chaucer’s imaginary Friar points out in attacking the equally imaginary Summoner, who also “had little purses and was a thief.”  You may also have noted the many ambiguous purses and codpieces in Renaissance portraits of the high and mighty.

approach of the jungle, site of foxhole

But back to my wild garden.  There is hanging from the tool shed near the liminal wall a rather fancy ceramic birdhouse, the gift of a long-departed friend.  Its location is wholly inappropriate to its function.  In fact its particular elegance is not really our style.  I put it there “temporarily” several years ago to keep it safe from lawn mowers.  I was amazed when Joan reported to me a few days ago that there was a nest and a bird in it, possibly a wren.  There had not been bird in it for a few years.  I wonder if that had anything to do with the family of foxes formerly living in their foxhole less than twenty yards away?   

 

But I only came to this realization recently.  For the reason I used to see foxes walking along the top of the stone wall was that the wall was for them the fastest route home.  They had dug out their home in a particularly jungly spot just beyond my property line.  When I stumbled upon it, I found that it was actually less a hole and more  a wide, shallow crater, of soup dish shape, spacious but virtually invisible in its surrounding high grass.  Even so, it was not a particularly good place for their abode, as they apparently decided fairly soon.  But they were there long enough to make the birds decamp, and it has taken some time for them to return.