Deer

Psalm 42

"As pants the hart for cooling streams so longs my heart for you..."

These are not be the exact words of the hymn by Nahum Tate and Nicolas Brady but they are the ones that I remember from the school assemblies of my teenage years.  The hymn was often sung. I tried to dislike it, along with the others which were sung frequently but somehow the picture of the deer running to the clear flowing stream for refreshment was clear in my head. It was mine. I think it was a hook on the end of a fishing line sent by God. It is one of those special memories. Can a school assembly be a memory as a thin place?

Today deer are in the news. The University of East Anglia is proposing that over seven hundred thousand deer should be culled annually in order to keep the status quo. Fourteen thousand road accidents a year involve deer.
Yesterday I was watching a programme about the eco-structure of the Scottish Highlands. Deer are an important element in the maintenance of that system, mainly uninterrupted by the automation of the twentieth century. There they can run to forest streams for refreshment without fear of the motor car.

Where am I now? Still carrying the picture in my mind's eye, still humming the tune, still looking to God for peace and security and frustrated by the way that modern man treats God's wonderful world.


*Of the deer family