One more day this lent seasonal journey. Almost there…
We live in a place called almost. Perhaps it has always been this way, but our culture invests a lot in creating a permanent sense of the almost. How else do we aspire? How else can we be persuaded to consume more and more? The irony here is that this kind of almost almost never leads to any real change… it just delivers a new kind of disatisfaction.
How might our lent journey be different? Perhaps there might be some value in pausing the focus on ‘next’ and spending some time instead on ‘now’.
This is not a revolutionary statement because mystics have been encouraging us to do that for a long time. Consider this familiar passage;
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?
Matthew 6, New International Version
Mobile phones, so often regarded as problematic for our human development and awareness, are after all just tools. I still marvel at the transformation they have made to navigation. After all, I am old enough to remember driving around cities as a young social worker with something called an A to Z – a street map – open on the passenger seat. A couple of years ago I discovered one more revolutionary use for our smart phones, in the form of an app that made recordings of birdsong and told me what I was listening to. There are a few of them – perhaps you use one too.
Almost always, the first birds we hear are robins or chaffinches.
Here we then have the background thrum of jackdaws, or the high-pitched chatter of flocks of siskins.
Soon you can tell the difference between the dawn sweetness of a thrush or blackbird, and even start to make educated guesses as to which warbler or tit you are hearing.
As you stand in spring birch woods, everything is singing back at you. There is no almost, there is just now. It is enough.
The feathered Eucharist
Happy are those birds above who
never go to mass - those
Happy fragile feathered things with
light not stained by glass.
Blessed are they beak and claw, their air
is ever sacred.
Blessed be their treetop temple, each twig
a flying arch
and sacred is each song that choirs
from sparrows and from larks.
Happy are the crows and cranes
Whose Eucharist is endless.
And may the vaulted holy sky
be full of wings as birds fly by
on their way to ruffled worship.
(With thanks to Juan Raman Jimenez, ‘The Silversmith and I’.)
CG
