Incomprehensible for Us Birds

Once again I sit looking out my window at the bird-feeder tree, this time as a cloudy morning brightens the sky uniformly. Today, tiny feather-balls drop from the tree to the landscaped rock bed and peck around at who knows what. I watch them randomly skitter around and peck until the neighbor's central air unit rumbles into action. Spastically, the whole community takes cover, returning to the safety of the branches of the tree. Though not appearing to be finished with the pecking work, they nevertheless find the loud noise reason enough to relocate, abandoning the task at hand.

How often am I like that little bird? How often do I flap off in terror when loud things happen at the "next house" down the block, things that have nothing to do with me, really, despite the loud noise they make? That's not to say I shouldn't ever seek a larger awareness and express active concern for the larger world where possible, but should I be fearfully reactive?

One of the first hallmark moves toward spiritual formation is the recognition that we know as little about the larger environment of our spiritual placement as these little birds knew of the suburban yards they inhabit. Henri Nouwen described this step of growth succinctly in his book, Spiritual Formation: "Spiritual formation leads not to a proud understanding of divinity, but to docta ignorantia, an 'articulate not-knowing.' " We can't help but react to the things that startle us, but we can humbly acknowledge the mystery that is--and always will be--larger than our knowing.

The One Thing

I grew corn this year.
For the first time in this backyard garden, I grew corn.
As I sat shucking that corn, I thought about my options.
Someone had sent me a link to a video about how I could optimize my time with a microwave oven and careful cob-chopping so that I spent only seconds actually engaged with corn-shucking thereby freeing myself to do multiple other tasks simultaneously.

But something in me languished at the thought of all that. Instead, I took the basket of corn into the back yard, sat in a lawn chair, and started shucking, old-school. With every ear, I considered the scope of this mini-rebellion. For once, I wanted to do just one thing. That's all. One thing.
Shucking corn demands your full physical engagement. Both hands. For the most part, a stationary position helps, too. It also demands light attention--are the silks all cleared off the ear? Are the kernels developed and of good quality?

I thoroughly enjoyed my fifteen minutes of single-purpose work, and that fifteen minutes came back to mind richly as I read the following passage in which Linus Mundy quotes Dee Dee Risher's article in The Other Side:
"One spiritual discipline we must try to recover is to enjoy tasks instead of simply viewing them as things to get done. How many activities are there in our lives in which enjoyment comes from the process of doing them rather than the accomplishment of having them finished? When I pondered this, I discovered that many of the things I enjoyed doing--cooking, gardening, writing letters with a pencil...walking are processes I [now] experience in new ways."

What's one thing you could do today that you can enjoy--not merely for finishing it, but also for simply doing it? What can have your undivided attention in the moment without that ever-present goal of completion intruding?

If you're at all like me, such an approach to the mundane is utterly foreign. It is counter-culture, a deliciously appealing, gleeful rebellion that I can now raise to the status of a spiritual practice.
O happy day!

Linus Mundy, The Complete Guide to Prayer-Walking. (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1996), 18.

Watch and Pray

Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.

For the Son of man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch...

And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch. --Mark 13:33-34,37

 

What does it mean to watch and pray?

I have a story to answer that question.

 

One day, a woman was working in her yard. It was simple work, trimming bushes and plucking upstart weeds from the rocks. She wandered in and out of the garage, puttering, and as she did, she noticed a bag of bird feed that was not quite empty. Rarely did she check the feeder this time of year. After all, bird food grew everywhere, right?  Still, pouring the remainder into the bird feeder would free up space on the garage shelf, so she took it out, stood on tip toes to wrestle the feeder down and filled it to the brim.

 

The next morning, the same woman sat looking out the window. She was praying, sort of. Mostly, she was just sitting, drinking coffee, and "being" with her God. As she stared not-quite blankly, she saw a beautiful cardinal land on the perch of the newly filled birdfeeder. The rising morning light enflamed his feathers as he delicately nipped at the birdseed.  As she watched, God turned the golden light into transcendent illumination. "All the weeks you left that feeder empty, and no birds came to feed. Why should they visit? But look here! The very day after you fill it, they begin to return." And she felt tears prick her eyes, because she'd been praying about her larger purpose. She'd been confused about the balance of productivity in her life as she sought to bless those around her. Fill the feeder. Give the birds a reason to come. Such an elegant answer.

 

Any other day, she would have looked and seen a pretty bird on a beautiful morning as it fed at a birdfeeder. But that day, that one day she received something different, something needful: a live sermon directly from God. Just for her. Just for then.

 

She received it because she watched and prayed.