PREDATOR DAY
YEAR TWENTY-FIVE.

OF GOD AS THE ALPHA PREDATOR.
SPOKEN BY ADAM ONE.

Dear Friends, dear Fellow Creatures, dear Fellow Mortals:

Long ago, we celebrated Predator Day on our lovely Edencliff Rooftop Garden. Our Children would don their faux-fur Predator ears and tails, and at sunset we’d light candles inside the Lions and Tigers and Bears fashioned from perforated tin cans, and the burning-bright eyes of these Predator images would sparkle upon our Predator Day feast.

But today our Festival must be held in the inner Gardens of our Minds. We are fortunate to have even these, for the Waterless Flood has now rolled over our city, and indeed over the entire Planet. Most were taken by surprise, but we relied on Spiritual guidance. Or, to put it in a materialistic way: we knew a global pandemic when we saw one.

Let us give thanks for this Ararat in which we have been sheltering over the past months. It is not perhaps the Ararat we would have chosen, situated as it is in the cellars of the Buenavista Condo Complex, which were dank even at the time of Pilar’s mushroom beds, and are even danker now. But we are blessed that so many of our Rat relatives have donated their protein to us, thus enabling us to remain on this Earthly plane. It is also fortunate that Pilar had built an Ararat in this very cellar, hidden behind a concrete block marked with a tiny bee symbol. How providential that so many of her supplies retained their freshness! Though unhappily not all.

But these resources are now exhausted, and we must either move or starve. Let us pray that the outer world is Exfernal no more — that the Waterless Flood has cleansed as well as destroyed, and that all the world is now a new Eden. Or, if it is not a new Eden yet, that it will be one soon. Or so we trust.

On Predator Day we celebrate, not God the loving and gentle Father and Mother, but God the Tiger. Or God the Lion. Or God the Bear. Or God the Wild Boar. Or God the Wolf. Or even God the Shark. Whatever the symbol, Predator Day is devoted to the qualities of terrifying appearance and overwhelming strength, which, since they are at times desired by us, must also belong to God, as all good things belong to Him.

As Creator, God has put a little of Himself into each of His Creatures — how could it be otherwise? — and therefore the Tiger, the Lion, the Wolf, the Bear, the Boar, and the Shark — or, on the miniscale of things, the Water Shrew and the Praying Mantis — are in their way reflections of the Divine. Human societies through the ages have known this. On their flags and coats of arms, they have not placed prey Animals such as Rabbits and Mice, but Animals capable of inflicting death, and when they invoked God as defender, was it not these qualities upon which they called?

Thus on Predator Day we meditate on the Alpha Predator aspects of God. The suddenness and ferocity with which an apprehension of the Divine may appear to us; our smallness and fearfulness — may I say, our Mouselikeness — in the face of such Power; our feelings of individual annihilation in the brightness of that splendid Light. God walks in the tender dawn Gardens of the mind, but He also prowls in its night Forests. He is not a tame Being, my Friends: he is a wild Being, and cannot be summoned and controlled like a Dog.

Human Beings may well have killed the last Tiger and the last Lion, but their Names are cherished by us; and as we say those Names, we hear behind them the tremendous Voice of God at the moment of their Creation. God must have said to them: My Carnivores, I command you to fulfil your appointed task of culling your Prey Species, lest these multiply overmuch, and exhaust their food supply, and sicken, and die out. Go forth, therefore! Leap! Run! Roar! Lurk! Spring! For I delight in your dread hearts, and in the gold and green jewels of your eyes, and in your well-fashioned sinews, and in your scissor teeth and your scimitar claws, which I Myself have bestowed upon you. And I give you My Blessing, and pronounce you Good.

For they do seek their meat from God, as Psalm 104 so joyfully puts it.

As we prepare to leave our sheltering Ararat, let us ask ourselves: Which is more blessed, to eat or to be eaten? To flee or to chase? To give or to receive? For these are at heart the same question. Such a question may soon cease to be theoretical: we do not know what Alpha Predators may lurk without.

Let us pray that if we must sacrifice our own protein so it may circulate among our fellow Species, we will recognize the sacred nature of the transaction. We would not be Human if we did not prefer to be the devourers rather than the devoured, but either is a blessing. Should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life.

Let us sing.