Isn’t it ironic that the big brained creatures use ‘bird brain’ as a derogatory image to suggest diminished intelligence … or we critique a small appetite by suggesting that someone eats like a bird … if we were to pay attention, we’d discover the enviable intelligence of our winged companions with compact brains and we’d discover they eat ferociously to stay alive or to bulk up to migrate.
Those first students of the Jesus tradition lived in a time of deep uncertainty … just as we do … a time when the only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain … so their teacher prescribes an over the counter antidote for their deep anxiety. In the midst of corruption … of the empire stealing from the poor to feed its insatiable machine, Jesus says learn from the best teachers around you.
“Consider the ravens” … they don’t spend their lives trying to accumulate a mountain of food and yet they don’t go hungry. And while you’re at it … cast your eye to the lilies and consider this great flower … it doesn’t worry about whether it will still be a flower tomorrow … it just shines in the grace of today.
In the midst of a million social problems … a epidemic of poverty … of peasants losing their land, of the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer, of corruption and exploitation, of deep uncertainty, in the angst of vulnerability … in the midst of it all, Jesus encouraged his friends to read their primary scriptures … to read the living text of the natural world … to learn from the bees and butterflies, to allow their attention to be focussed on that which has roots and that which has wings, by ravens and lilies, birds and flowers, of sky and sea, of rock and trees … to learn how to live in the fragility and wonder of life.
As Ron Atkinson reminded us, it is so easy not to notice … its easy not to hear the voices of the birds … to miss the geese overhead mysteriously knowing which way is warm … the songbirds waiting for the cold front to bring an updraft behind it giving them a tail wind for their migration … its easy to miss the chickadee who keeps us company all year long somehow surviving the deep freeze of our winters … the crows gathering to grieve one they have lost.
But if we were to pay attention to the birds, we would know that whatever the day brings, we must sing … it might be a mournful lament … or it might be a calling out to another … or it might be a rejoicing in the return of daylight … but whatever the day brings, song is as essential as bread.
And if we were to pay attention to the birds, we’d know that every nest we build is a place of shelter but it is always temporary … it is home for a time. John O’Donohue speaks of a wonderful short story by Liam O’Flaherty called “The First Flight.”
“(It) tells the story of a parent bird pushing a little one out of the nest into its first flight on its journey toward autonomy. When the eagle teaches her young to fly she pushes him out of the nest and he drops in dead fall. But she is swift enough to sweep in under him and catch him before he perishes on the rocks bellow. After some other attempts the little one then learns that he has wings which will keep him up in the air.”
(“Four Elements” by John O’Donohue p. 32-33)
Each nest we build … each perch we find … are temporary shelter, temporary resting places … but we were born to fly just as we were born to sing … whatever else life is, it is endless movement … endless adaptation to never ending change … to stay in the nest would be to miss being alive …it is certain death … but to discover one’s wings opens a new world …
It seems we have to discover our wings again and again in life … not just once like the baby eagle but again and again discovering we have what we need to meet whatever comes …
Maybe we didn’t our metaphor quite right with “bird brain” or “eating like a bird” … but I think we got it right with the “bird’s eye view” … the other wisdom of our feathered friends is perspective … the aerial view … the longer, larger view … it is so easy for us to become myopic …to not see the forest for the trees … to lose track of the long story to which we belong … to lose track of the trajectory … the long arc of the universe that bends toward co-operation not competition … that leans into interdependence …
You might be tempted to say we “this is for the birds” but I beg to differ … I think its for us … to remember the raven … to mind the magpie … to consider the chickadee … to open the window to wonder and find the wisdom of winged creatures ready to teach us how to live in the strength of our vulnerability and the beauty of our fragile lives.
-Nancy Steeves
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