unicorns

This little unicorn lives at the bottom of the stained glass window at my church.  It symbolizes hope. That's its official symbology, not just my own take on it. It also symbolizes Scotland... but other than making me imagine how cool Scotland might be, I don't really identify with that. The Bible actually speaks about unicorns in Job and a few other places. In Job it speaks of their strength and aloofness. Strict adherers to the unadulterated truth of the Bible don't like to hear that the good ole Unicorn shows up there...oh, and in the super authoritative  KJV too.  But I kind of love that it is in there. I think the word was actually created by the writers of the King James when they didn't know what to call a specific animal that was showing up in the original Hebrew.  It certainly is a thing of myth, but maybe one of the more beautiful mythological creatures we have come up with. J.K. Rowling saw it as a creature of pure goodness in her Harry Potter books. It appears in the Arthurian Legends as something of light and mystery, a trophy for those pure of heart. For me, it speaks to the mystery that I am asked to believe every time I step foot in that church on Sundays, a bridge between the mundane and the spiritual. It is a little symbol of the great step I take to have faith in something hard to believe in: God and his love for us. Grace and its impossibility. That there is hope for humanity beyond our self-destruction, and that death doesn't actually keep us. That there truly is something made of pure goodness, and that that being sees us, understands us, knows and holds us, in spite of us. That is a lot to believe, and in my own life of worry and work, it is no small thing to try to allow for unicorns.