Chaplain’s Column
Of Gophers and Golfers
With cooler weather, I finally made it onto the beautiful golf course on this installation. I had a laugh before even starting my round, though, as I watched another golfer tee off.
He hit a beautiful drive: high in the air, right down the fairway … until it stopped dead in a puff of sand, when it hit a gopher’s mound. When he started to gripe, his companions would have none of it: “Oh, come on – take pride! You couldn’t have done that on purpose in a hundred tries!”
I thought, “Besides that, it could be worse – you could be the gopher!” And with that, my mind went to Robert Burns’ classic poem, “To a Mouse.”
In the poem, Burns expresses sympathy for a field mouse whose cozy winter home has been destroyed by a plow. His central point is the famous line, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.”
Here too, a gopher and a golfer each had grand hopes – their best-laid schemes – until they collided to ruin both the gopher’s tunnel and the golfer’s drive. Each of us likewise faces sudden and unexpected disappointments, just when we thought we had our lives planned out.
Like a golf ball from nowhere, factors outside our control can arrive to wreck our plans. Natural disaster, crime, illness, or any of an endless list of surprises can foil our best-laid schemes.
Our first reaction is likely to be the golfer’s: frustration and dismay, even cynicism. In the most insightful stanza of Burns’ poem, he realizes that the mouse is blessed compared to a human, because his only concern is for the present.
Looking to the past, we humans feel sorrow at broken dreams; looking to the future, we feel fear and uncertainty. The mouse knows only the task of rebuilding a home.
We are at our best when even in the midst of frustrated plans and disrupted dreams; we can pause and celebrate the blessings of the present.
The golfer’s companions encouraged exactly that: rather than despair at the spoiled drive, or fuss about the future, why not enjoy the game – including the comical outcome of that shot?
It is more difficult to ‘embrace the moment’ when today’s hardships and frustrations are more severe.
Can we enjoy the present, when circumstances threaten not a golf score, but our life goals, our possessions, or even our lives?
The recent popular emphasis on “mindfulness,” helping us engage with the experiences and emotions of the moment, is not new. It is a new framing of an ancient challenge, to live in the present without fear of the uncertain future, or dismay at the unfulfilled dreams of the past.
What Burns, the angry golfer, and even some advocates of “mindfulness” miss, is that the key to that freedom is not a feigned ignorance of the past or the future.
It is not a cultivated nonchalance about the present, as if the surprise disappointments are not painful.
It comes most effectively through a relationship with – and trust in – a God who knows what we do not know, and controls what we cannot control. There we find perspective and peace, confidence and gratitude.
The best-laid schemes of mice and men, of gophers and golfers, may go awry. However, a loving, gracious, merciful God has not forgotten us.
May that God bring you unshakeable gratitude this Thanksgiving season!