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A neighbour’s hedge trimmed into the shape of a cat.

A man commuting to work on a unicycle. 

A squirrel running up a tree. In its mouth, a piece of toast. 

These are the top 3 things from my ‘list of absurd’ for the week. The first two—the neighbour’s hedge, and a man commuting to work on a unicycle—are my own eye-witness accounts. The squirrel running up a tree with a piece of toast in its mouth was told to me by one of the youth at Camp Artaban last weekend. When I asked what kind of food squirrels tuck away for the winter, the youth relayed this tale. 

Naturally, I had many questions. 

How did the squirrel get the toast? Did someone pop a piece of bread in the toaster especially for the squirrel? Or, was it that someone was enjoying a piece of toast when they turned away for a moment only to find that when they turned back their breakfast had vanished?

In an essay written for aspiring writers, Raoul Fernandes suggests that “Paying attention, deeply and mindfully, is one of the most important practices . . . as a writer.”

“The brain, usually so focused on its daily business — keeping safe crossing the road, what to make for dinner, turning over a futile argument — wants to dismiss the irrelevant, impractical micro-thoughts that flit around in the shadows. They seem useless or even dangerous to focus on.”

“Is this why so many poets don’t drive?” he asks.*

Paying attention to the irrelevant, the impractical—the absurd—is something I have to practice—like a sport or a musical instrument. By contrast, I have a family member, who has ADHD, and they are particularly good at noticing the absurd. At any moment, a routine conversation—what you did over the weekend, the project you've been working on—can be interrupted. Often it's when they spot a crow pruning the feathers of another crow who doesn’t seem particularly moved by the gesture. Or, when two junco birds eating seeds on the balcony suddenly becomes an idea for a drawing. “Junco squared” is what they’ll call it. A junco with a “2”—the mathematical symbol for “squared”—bouncing over its head.

Lately, I’ve been finding that keeping a list of the absurd is working better for me than the often prescribed gratitude list. I am grateful for things like a roof over my head, a place to call home, the health of my family, food for the day, and a job that I love, and certainly bringing these things to mind regularly is an important mental health exercise. But, sometimes, after a particularly hard day, or during a particularly bad bout of depression, it’s noticing what’s really odd about the world that saves me.

I love thinking of the story from our gospel reading today as a story about the leper who took time to notice the absurd. I imagine that the other nine, who had just been healed, were running off to the priests to show that they were clean so that they might once again be accepted into society. So that they could finally get back to wondering about those everyday things like what to make for dinner or, I wonder if I offended my coworker again?

And, who could blame them? What to make for dinner, interpersonal relationships are very good and very human things to worry about—a  privilege, even, their perfect ordinariness something we can often take for granted. 

Yet, it is the leper who stops to acknowledge just how totally weird what’s just happened is that Jesus holds up as an example. Here is this man, a Samaritan, an outsider, who has no business mixing with the so-called ‘in-crowd ’, and he goes and gets himself healed by their leader. The whole situation is weird. Impractical. Dangerous, even. Kind of like having a pet blessing at the same time as the Eucharist!

But that’s Jesus for you. Noticing, maybe even practising the absurd, is an act of thanksgiving in God’s eyes. When giving thanks feels forced or when a gratitude list isn’t quite cutting it, we can notice what is strange and unusual in our lives. Doing so helps us to acknowledge that there exists a universe beyond our imagination, a reality beyond our present circumstances, a something other than what we see in front of us. 

After all, God has already performed the most absurd act of all: being born of a human mother and living among us as one of us; dying a criminal's death when he was destined to become a king; and rising to life again when there was supposed to be no hope of resurrection.

We are created by an absurd God, so this Thanksgiving let us delight in an absurd creation. Amen.


*Work cited: Raoul Fernandes, “Birds Outside the Boardroom Windows” in Andrew Chesham and Laura Farina, eds., Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing (Anvil Press, 2022).