Run To The Rescue With Love
When Joaquin Phoenix won his Oscar for Best Actor in 2020 for the movie Joker, he quoted some of the most powerful words that fire the best of humanity. They were taken from a song his late brother, River, wrote as a teen.
And those words were this: “Run to the rescue with love, and peace will follow”.
They sprang to our minds and hearts recently when we received a late-night call from a metropolitan police station requesting our urgent assistance for a sheep on the run around the suburban streets of their precinct. Summoning a rescue team together, the good folks quickly bundled themselves into the vehicle and it was soon rolling out the sanctuary gates, as the words “run to the rescue with love” were uttered.
Piecing together the frightened animal’s past, it became clear she had escaped a backyard slaughter. And whilst such an activity is legal in our society, it is no less abhorrent and comes complete with a laundry list of welfare issues. Not to mention the human health ones.
Yet despite all this, before us today is a being who no longer trembles at our presence, but one who welcomes it. And as we search for words to describe to you just who our new woolly friend is, we locate “gentle” and “kind”, and “readily coming to the fore”, but the one which commands our hearts the most is “forgiving”.
Forgiving our kind which has so trespassed against hers, from the disregard of her bodily integrity to seeking to bring about her premature end. And in her capacity to do this we see many great learnings. The most obvious is in her state of mind, for gone is that anxious state that once claimed her. In that space now, it is visibly clear she is at peace with the world. The flow-on effects within her body are many and speak of the meditative calm that follows forgiveness.
Although this dear girl understands she has no more cause to run in this world, it is exactly what she does into our hearts each time we greet her. And so now with her place in this world safe and secure, there was but one more thing we needed to provide her with.
A name.
In honour of her incredible tale of redemption and those most powerful and prophetic words – “run to the rescue with love, and peace will follow” – we can think of no finer name than Run.