Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

The end of my sabbatical time in Africa was spent on a safari through the north of Tanzania. I was able to traverse the Serengeti during the great migration, witness a lion kill in the Ngorangoro Crater, and see endless herds of elephants and giraffes in the Tarangire National Park. I am stunned and altered by the vastness of God’s ecological web.

The Ngorangoro Crater was a mythic experience.

This national game park is nestled in the 120 square mile collapsed crater of an ancient volcano. In the ancient past this cone stood as high as Kilimanjaro but now has a rim at 7000 feet and a basin at 5000 feet. It is full of animals.

It used to have an ecologically sustainable population of Masaii tribal villages who herded in the midst of pure, brutal nature, but they have now moved out to government provided lands. What is left is a microcosm of Creation.

In our time in the crater, we witnessed firsthand lions hunting down a young cape buffalo. It was so intense to watch lions who a few moments before had been shading themselves in the shadow of our vehicle rise up, flank, stalk, and take down the calf after stampeding the herd from a watering hole. Nine lions then descended on the poor beast and began feeding. Within fifteen minutes, the buffalo herd regrouped and led by three strong bulls attacked the lions driving them off their fallen member. Two bulls then actually tried to use their horns to stand their dead comrade up on her feet again, even though by this time she was dead.

We witnessed the circle of life and death before our eyes, death in this kill and life in a courting ritual dance of two huge rhinos. Our guide told us the two could engage in its cross country “chase and face” for three to five weeks before mating. They trot across the countryside, the male in pursuit. Occasionally, they will turn and face one another and joust with their horns. Sometimes she will pee and he will go wild. Only after this innate ritual will they mate. We watched the whole thing for over an hour and then a few miles later saw a mother and her adolescent calf wandering toward water. The crater only has 30 rhinos and we saw six of them in one day.

What we witnessed that day is testament to how wonderfully, fearfully creation is made. God knit into the fabric of the whole earth and of each individual species an imprint that directs our unfolding in some mysterious, relentless striving for life. Nature trumps nurture in the Ngorangoro Crater. And we are a part of the whole, a part of it all.