Rector’s Ramblings – April 10, 2025

As today's text prayer noted, dire wolves are back! Sort of. For Game of Thrones fans, the dire wolves from the series are second only to the dragons for popular characters without any spoken lines. In the fantasy world of George R.R. Martin, dire wolves are enormous. The real dire wolves were bigger than today's wolves, but not that big. Nonetheless, I've already seen a picture of George holding a dire wolf puppy as part of the publicity for the biotech company that did the genetic work. 

Other scientists have said these three puppies, Remus, Romulus (the Roman brothers credited with founding Rome - popular legend says were raised by a she-wolf), and Khaleesi (a character from GoT), are not actually dire wolves. They are hybrid gray wolves whose DNA really isn't from a dire wolf. These party poopers insist that the DNA is only slightly modified in the big scheme of things. But they do look cute if you've seen photos of the fluffy white carnivores!

One researcher told the BBC, "Extinction is still forever," and cautioned, "Without extinction, how are we going to learn from our mistakes?" Yikes! That's a pretty sinister bar, isn't it? I'm all for learning from our mistakes. It's a life lesson we teach our kids or attempt to teach them anyway. Hopefully, we can learn from mistakes long before they reach the point of extinction-level events. Right? RIGHT?!?!?! What if the extinction isn't our fault, meaning the lesson isn't ours to learn? We didn't kill off the dire wolves any more than we killed off the wooly mammoths that this same genetic firm is also trying to resurrect.

In fact, I think learning from the mistakes of others is even superior to learning from our own mistakes. Sometimes we're too stubborn or thick-headed to learn via easier methods, so we are doomed to screw it up for ourselves. We can hope, though! And we do screw up plenty of things. There are countless species that no longer exist because of humans. We're not to blame for everything, but we should be able to admit when we are to blame. Learning how not to repeat problems and failures is essential. So is knowing that our attempts to fix mistakes don't consistently achieve what we intend.

We can learn from Michael Crichton's fictional Jurassic Park books about messing with extinct DNA. I don't want to see velociraptors or T-Rexs come back to life, and frankly, I don't know that I want to run into one of these so-called dire wolves, either. What if dire wolves have something to do with the return of dragons after all? Then we'll all be in trouble. (I don't believe in dragons; I'm just making a point.) Unintended consequences don't need to be punchlines; they are a reality in many spaces.

One of the hardest life lessons is indeed realizing that we can effect change that is unchangeable. We can't always reset or rewind, and we can't bring things back to life when we are responsible for their demise. Think of the innocent child who unknowingly crushes a butterfly while admiring it. We have to learn that the butterfly isn't coming back to life. This reality of the finality of some things, like death, is also the chief motivator of our faith. We can't resurrect anything. We believe that God can, though. We may not understand resurrection life, but that doesn't make it less of a theological truth.

This season of Lent that wraps up next week in Holy Week is about learning from our mistakes AND experiencing resurrection—new life after all kinds of deaths, small and large. We can't undo extinction or most of what we have done, but we can adapt, change, and grow. We never stop learning lessons we began to learn as children. Sometimes, the butterfly dies, and sometimes, it hides in a cocoon until it finds new life again. I'm happy to think it's possible to bring back big fluffy white wolves, but I'm ok with admitting it's more style over substance. God isn't impressed by style yet cares greatly about our substance. Fortunately, God also cares about us and our lives, which gives us hope amid our "dire" situation. We don’t need the bar set to extinction.

Tom+