The bard’s “Show Me the Place” song on his new album titled Old Ideas lent an ethereal air to a prosaic errand this morning. The hound I brought home over ten years ago, starving, cut up, and covered in ticks is aging fast, and we’re trying to keep him comfortable. 
But about a week ago, he sported a sizable mass on his neck and started walking even more awkwardly (3 mincing steps with his forelegs for every two lanky ones with his hind). I’m not keen on putting animals through terror and pain for some hoped-for cure or help long down the road, but there’s a chance we can do some minor things to ease the pup’s way now. So, I dropped him first thing this morn at the vet for tests. Then as I wound my way home in the dull gray of a day promising rain, our local 91.9, WNRN, played this new song.
What a poet, Leonard Cohen. “Show me the place where you want your slave to go… Show me the place for my head is bending low… Show me the place, help me roll away the stone. I can’t move this thing alone… Show me the place where the word became a man. Show me the place where the suffering began. The troubles came, I saved what I could save… But there were chains, so I hastened to the hay… ”
It struck me again, the shockingly paradoxical nature of Christmas: God as a baby. Think about it, the single most defining characteristic of a baby — helpless. One cannot but help a baby, protect it, and yes serve it. Christianity makes much of Jesus’s coming as a servant to all, Jesus’s suffering for the world… But Christmas! Christmas turns that on its head. It makes of us the ones protecting, the ones serving, the keepers from harm. In the process, though (paradox on paradox), it rights itself again. For in the serving we are served. I don’t know how our sweet dog will do, and yet this song with its questions and longing answers something.
