Bird Watching on The Baptism of Our Lord

It was 14^oF when I went out to pick up the newspaper from the end of the driveway.  It was unusually quiet for a Sunday morning.  It was too early for the murmuring exodus of cars headed to church or too cold for the dogs who yip at every dashing squirrel, and there were no leaf blowers howling   — any unraked leaves being conveniently buried under 4 inches of icy snow. All of which made the sharp knocks from across the street hard to miss.  

I spotted his red crest first.  Undeterred by the cold, or the darting wrens, a pileated woodpecker was digging into a tree across the street.  I stood and watched him until I was shivering, then slipped inside to grab something to take a photo with (Math Man's phone sitting right inside the door). The dried leaves shimmied in the rising breeze, sounding as if a rushing river had materialized overnight on the next street, and the woodpecker processed his way up the trunk, unruffled by the wind, huge in dignity.  The Lord God Bird, or rather its cousin.

Tomorrow is the last day of the Christmas season, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord (at least on the current calendar, the note in my breviary for Epiphany is clear that if January 8th falls on a Sunday, Baptism of the Lord is omitted and Ordinary Time starts immediately on Monday).  The Gospel will leave us with the image of the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus in the Jordan - in the form of a περιστεραν (peristera).  The translation will say "dove" but it could equally well have been rendered "pigeon" -- the Greek gets translated both ways in the New Testament, and there is no clear line between doves and pigeons.  I suspect we get dove because pigeon pulls up images of splattered statues and aggressive birds 

I went to a talk last spring where the speaker referred to the Holy Spirit as a  "feral pigeon" as a matter of course (and which also featured an extended reflection on the ivory billed woodpecker, also known as the Lord God Bird.)  This characterization of God as feral continues to haunt me, it seems both almost profane, dancing with heresy.  But then I think what's the opposite of feral?  Domesticated? Could I really think of God, of the Holy Spirit, as "domesticated"?  That, I think, is heresy. God as a creature we have gradually accustomed to living with us?  God who doesn't endanger us?  God who is subordinate to us?  No, no and absolutely not.

Feral, which carries the sense of unruly, even dangerous, seems more apt for God, who promises us not tranquility, but presence in the storms.

The Holy Spirit shakes things up, blesses the unexpected as well as the ordinary.  Of course She is feral, and not in the least domesticated. She may even be a pigeon, strutting on the streets of Philadelphia.

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A snippet from the interwebs that sticks with me, about disturbing word choices.  Child to waitstaff:  "I wish to devour the unborn."  Waitstaff: "Excuse me."  Mother (with a long sigh):  "He wants eggs.  Scrambled eggs."

Dodos are in the same family as pigeons (Columbidae).



Varying language lets us dance, pick up and shake something

The Art of Packing a Camel (Redux)

Things I learned last year:  that camels originated in North America (in South Dakota! and were originally the size of a rabbit) and that the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles contain many a camel skeleton.

This is a version of a piece I wrote four years ago for This Ignatian Life, which is alas, no longer available on the web.  I'm thinking again, on this traditional feast of the Epiphany about what I lug around with me, and how well balanced my load is. Full disclosure, while I have (once) ridden an actual camel, I’ve never packed one.

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow." — T. S. Eliot from The Journey of the Magi

Four years ago today, on Epiphany, I walked resolutely (so says my journal) out of the retreat house dining room and into the Spiritual Exercises.  Like Matthew’s magi, I had had a long journey there, though it required not that I follow a star, but instead have the stars in my life align.  One by one, the pieces had fallen into place. A sabbatical leave in the spring semester, space left in the January 30-day retreat, kids’ schedules, and suddenly I found myself packing a duffel and driving (north)east.

The Exercises are designed to flow back into everyday life, what some call “the fifth week”.  For me, the Exercises truly began not when I walked out of that dining room, but when I started jotting a list of things to pack: this was my zeroth week.  I packed with the First Principle and Foundation tacked up on my bulletin board:  “And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.”

The choice of a composition of place and Gospel text for these meditations was obvious, for at least in December, it was hard to pack without having the magi hovering over my shoulder.  What exactly goes into your camel’s saddlebags? What do you take on a journey to pay homage to a King, to meet God in the flesh, to walk with Jesus in the Exercises?  And what do you rid yourself of before you leave?

In the end I took very little: two sweaters, an extra pair of jeans, snow boots — for the ways were surely deep and the weather sharp where I was going — and my knitting.  I still took too much.  Four translations of the Psalms. Four?  And a set of watercolors that I never once touched.

I confess I still find it hard to be a minimalist packer in a culture where big cars and bigger box stores make it easy to buy in bulk, where spectators routinely roll tents and and chairs and packed coolers across the athletic fields for an afternoon, and a trip to the mall with a small child requires more gear than your average camel could cart.  Their subtexts are difficult for me to tune out:  Don’t run out.  Be prepared.  Keep your options open.

Me, my traveling bag and camel at La Brea.

In themselves, these desires are not evils.  My family’s life runs more smoothly when the household doesn’t run out of laundry detergent or toilet paper; my students are well served when I have everything I need for the day’s demonstration tucked into my teaching bag. Yet I worry that I so insulate myself from needs that it becomes difficult for me to grasp that everything I have comes from and returns to God. Even the everyday things like laundry detergent.

So four years later I find myself returning to the contemplations of my zeroth week — even when I pack so much as my lunch.  I ask the questions that the magi must have faced with a long journey ahead, where the weight of what you carried could — quite literally — drain the life from your camels.  Where you might have to sit on what you had packed, so that with each passing mile the lumps and edges of your luggage gives you galls.  Where balance is not a metaphor, but a hard reality.

To choose to travel in this way is to make manifest that I do not know what the journey will bring.  It is to practice trust in the workings of the Spirit.  It is to grasp that empty spaces are opportunities, not to stash yet another gadget to be better prepared for some eventuality, but to be able to stow an unforeseen gift given along the way.  That what I bring in my saddlebags is not just for myself, but much is meant to be left with those I meet.

I learned on the Exercises that there is an art to packing a camel.  One I can keep practicing, even if the journey is only to my office, and my saddlebags hang not on the sides of a camel, but on the back of my bike.

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You can listen to T.S. Eliot read his poem Journey of the Magi here.

Advice on Tweeting from Ignatius of Loyola

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Perhaps someone should send these to PEOTUS?

First two tweets are from letter to Robert Claysson, SJ whose letters Ignatius felt to be blustery, inflated, and repetitious; third tweet is from a letter to Pierre Favre, SJ from Ignatius of Loyola on the subject of writing letters in which he begged his companions in the society to edit their letters to him to keep him from having to redact them for organization and clarity before they can be shown to outside eyes.

Darkness and light

At 10 am on Christmas Eve we headed to the airport to collect Crash, fresh off his run as the Ghost of Christmas Future in Christmas Carol (and tech crew for same).  Before we left, I tossed all the towels — kitchen and otherwise — into the wash.  We retrieved Crash from the clutches of the airport, and returned home to decorate the tree.  (#WarOnAdvent)  I went to turn on Christmas carols, but the computer refused to start.  Was it unplugged?  Ah, the light was out in the back, too.

I headed down to check the circuit breakers.  Uh-oh, the basement is dark, too.  Washer and dryer?  Dead, dead, dead.  And not a single circuit breaker is flipped.  Uh-oh.  And the internet is out.  All together half the house is out of power, though thankfully not the circuits on which the oven or the furnace rely.  Shall we  try to find an electrician on a Saturday that is also Christmas Eve?  The first 24/7 place I tried turned out to be not quite as 24/7 as you might think.   But a local company was still open and sent someone.  (He suspected it was not the interior wiring; I call PECO, our local power suppliers, who begs to differ.)

He was right, it was the power lines to the house, so nothing he could fix. I call PECO back, wending my way through layers of menus. (We've been watching Stranger Things on Netflix - the menus remind me of the membranes that separate the parallel universes, sticky, hard to get through.)  We eventually get into the queue to be repaired, after I assured them that we'd had an electrician out who could verify the issue was in their lines, not ours.

Meanwhile my tech crew strung extension cords from working sockets to light the tree, and power the mixer and on we went, decorating hearth and tree, making dough for sweet cinnamon buns and crisp hard rolls.

A people in darkness have seen a great light, proclaimed the lector at the vigil Mass at which I was serving.  I wondered how much light we'd have when I got home.  Not much as it turned out.  My merry men had dragged a floor lamp into the back room and were playing a rousing game of Carcassonne.  PECO had arrived moments before and the lights went off in the whole house.

The lights returned after a while, and suddenly, in the east, there was light.  Two lights actually.  A people in darkness were once again linked into the universe, or at least the interwebs.

Once connected, we didn't fully plug back in for a few days, until Crash departed, even though we could.  No TV or movies.  We played games, we ate, we cooked together, we read.  We laughed and talked.  And ate some more.

Today is the feast of the Holy Family.  Crash has gone back to work on a new production, and I'm still thinking about light and darkness and family, the Nunc Dimittis gently playing in my mental background and this gorgeous detail of Simeon holding the infant Jesus, dancing with light on my desktop.

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This version of the Tallis Scholar's singing Arvo Pärt's setting of the Nunc Dimittis is worth a listen.

We are finally back up and running, thanks to the work of three different PECO crews, a tree trimming crew and my own crew.

Column: Holy Family: Pondering God-within

Illustration of the Holy Family from the
15th century Besancon Book of Hours. 

I encountered this illustration on Twitter, then tracked down the source.  I love not only that Mary is reading in bed and St. Joseph is cradling a sleeping infant Christ, but I also adore the cow ass munching on St. Joseph's halo.  The whole scene feels like a lesson in lectio divina, where the ancient monks advised chewing on scripture as cows on their cud.

And my mother was much on my mind this Christmas, though it's been more than a decade since she died.

I'm two books into those Christmas gifts...and shipped Crash what didn't fit into his carry-on.

A version of this column appeared at CatholicPhilly.com.

“…his mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.” Luke 2:51b-52

The day after Christmas, Christopher Howse, who writes on religion for Britain’s The Telegraph tweeted a picture of his favorite Nativity scene — Mary in bed reading a book while Joseph cradles a sleeping Jesus in his arms — taken from a 15th century French Book of Hours. Thinking of the Gospel for the Mass on Christmas Day, the prologue to St. John’s Gospel, I retweeted the image with the comment, “We take our Christmas cues from John’s Gospel - in the beginning was the Word.  Book, books, everywhere…”

It’s true, we all got books. History, fiction, science-fiction and fantasy, math. Once we’d opened gifts on Christmas afternoon, everyone settled down with a new book. My mother loved to read, so it’s not a surprise that her children or grandchildren share her passion for the written word.  But the line my mother loved best from all those books was from Luke’s Gospel, where it appears not once, but twice, in the second chapter: “Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart.”

As I listened to the Gospel on Christmas, I thought of my mother and this verse.  What do I treasure? What do I hold close in my heart, turning it round and round?  Like Mary, joys and sorrows both. Family. God, surely.

But in the depths of my heart?  Every Friday, in the psalms set out for Morning Prayer, the Church prays this verse, “Indeed you love truth in the heart, then in the secret of my heart, teach me wisdom.”

Christmas brings me face to face with God revealed, God who has arrived, God who had pitched his tent among us.  It nudges me to look outside myself, to notice God loose in the world, God in the everyday — in line at the post office, knocking on my office door and huddling in the rain on the corner of Lancaster and Morris, waiting for the bus.

But Luke’s portrait of Mary reminds me that God-with-us is also God-within-us. That as much as we are called to kneel in adoration at the manger, or to trumpet “Joy to the world!” we are also called to quietly cradle God in the secret recesses of our hearts, to open the book in which God resides, to relish it, and ponder the Word in our hearts. It is a reminder that we are all called contemplative prayer, to sit quietly with a few or no words, to rest in God.

So over these next few days I’m sneaking out each night for a short walk amid the beautiful lights in my neighborhood, taking some quiet time to hold God-within, to ponder the words of the psalm, “teach me wisdom,” that in this new year I, too, might find favor before God.