Birds

Wheeling through the summer sky, perching in the treetops, feeding their young, birds go about their business as generally unconcerned with the human race as the human race is generally unconcerned with them. But every so often they do something that catches our attention. Canada geese heading south in the shape of a V. A white-throated sparrow grieving over poor Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody. A cardinal darting through the shrubbery like a flame. For a moment or two even the dullest of us dimly realizes the world would be a poorer place without them.

One wonders if from time to time birds feel the same way about us. A man with an umbrella walking in the rain. A woman in a bathing suit picking peas. The patter song of a two-year-old in the sandbox. Do birds every once in a while see us as we see them, as basically irrelevant but occasionally worth the cocking of a beady eye, the flicker of a wing, the first few notes of a song?

~originally published in Beyond Words

Blessings

The word blessing has come to mean more often than not a pious formality such as ministers are continually being roped into giving at high-school graduations, Rotarian wienie roasts, and the like, and to say "God bless you" to a person, unless that person happens to have just sneezed, is generally regarded as a pious eccentricity. It was not always so.

In the biblical sense, if you give me your blessing, you irreversibly convey into my life not just something of the beneficent power and vitality of who you are, but something also of the life-giving power of God, in whose name the blessing is given. Even after old, half-blind Isaac discovered that he had been hoodwinked into blessing the wrong twin, he could no more take the blessing back and give it to Esau than he could take the words of it out of the air and put them back into his mouth again.

Religious language has come to such a pass that perhaps "luck," of all words, suggests the reality of this better than "blessing." Everybody knows that luck has magic in it and that when you have it, you really have something. It may see you through hard times. It may win you the sweepstakes. A blessing, on the other hand, has come to seem something on the order of a Hallmark friendship card.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Books

Books are to read, but that is by no means the end of it.

The way they are bound, the paper they are printed on, the smell of them (especially if they are either very new or very old), the way the words are fitted to the page, the look of them in the bookcasesometimes lined up straight as West Point cadets, sometimes leaning against each other for support or lying flat so you have to tip your head sideways to see them properly. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, the Pleiade edition of Saint Simon, Chesterfield's letters, the Qur'an. Even though you suspect you will probably never get around to them, it is an honor just to have them on your shelves.

Something of what they contains gets into the air you breathe. They are like money in the bank, which is a comfort even though you never spend it. They are prepared to give you all they've got at a moment's notice, but are in no special hurry about it. In the meanwhile they are holding their tongues, even the most loquacious of them, even the most passionate.

They are giving you their eloquent and inexhaustible silence. They are giving you time to find your way to them. Maybe they are giving you time, with or without them, just to find your way.

 

Bread

We don't live by bread alone, but we also don't live long without it. To eat is to acknowledge our dependence both on food and on each other. It also reminds us of other kinds of emptiness that not even the blue-plate special can touch.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Brothers

Cain murdered Abel. Jacob cheated Esau. Joseph's brothers sold him for twenty shekels and would probably have paid twice that to get him out of their hair. The Prodigal's elder brother couldn't stand being in the same room with him even with a fatted calf for inducement. As the Bible presents it, one of the closest of all relationships is also one of the saddest.

Envy and fear are apparently near to the heart of itone brother is afraid the other is loved more, favored more, given and forgiven more, gets away with morebut that doesn't seem enough of an explanation somehow. You have a sense of signals crossed, of opportunities missed, of messages unheard or unheeded, in short of love gone wrong. You can't help thinking what friends they might have been if they hadn't been enemies. Cain giving Abel a hand with the spring lambing. Jacob letting Esau have his pottage just for the hell of it.

We all have the same dark secrets and the same bright hopes. We come from the same place and are headed in the same direction. Above everything else maybe, we all want to be known by each other and to know each other. Iraq and the United States, the Arabs and the Israelis, the terrorists and the terrorizedwe are all of us brothers, all of us sisters.

Yet from the way we manage things most of the time, who in a million years would ever guess it? Who can remain unmoved by the thought of how the world might be if we only managed things right?

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words