A secret revealed at last!:
We have a hedgehog, and her name is Hippolyta, and Ennis just found out today.
She’s a small thing, all creamy white, with a nearly bare belly and tiny little legs that can move surprisingly fast.
She likes burrowing into Ennis’s pocket and– somewhat alarmingly– up the leg of my big fleece pants.
How can I share today’s delight? It’s not so much the details, the look on Ennis’s face or the hilarious contortions Ms Hip, aka the pocket pig, went into when we let her explore and she tried to annoint herself with frothy spit (it’s a hedgehog thing).
The delight was the sharing of delight. That something I love was loved by the person I most love. The shared focus, the comical scurrying around to stop the hedgepig from escaping under the couch. It was discovery and present-ness, and the communion of wonder that this was real: Are you seeing this? Yes!, are you??
That’s as good as Jesus, as good as church, better even. Because you don’t know what will happen. There’s no format, no hymnal, no calendar of liturgy or prescribed routine for forgiveness: there is only watching, paying attention, saying I love and Look at that together.
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