These Feathered Friends

How Birds Teach Us the Meaning of Life

“Let birds become our teachers and flowers, our theolgians.”

—Martin Luther

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

I am thinking of many of you today—many whom I’ve never met in the Substack world; many whom I have grown to love and many who are on a journey like my own.  I am sitting here in my brown leather chair which rocks with the cadence of the emergence of spring here in the mountains. With every rock, and tap of my foot, spring comes closer. So, I seem to rock a lot these days.

I’m thinking how much I would like for you to see what I am  a witness to these chilly mornings when the sun rises and burns the dew off the grass and branches of the leafless trees which are pregnant with their greening inside.

I’m looking at scores of birds which have come to feast as they do every morning now. They must come here for breakfast and to sing a welcome to the sun and offer a hymn of praise for the  glory of the morning.

I’m high up in a glass sided room attached to my home which I call “my glass treehouse” or better known to me as my private glass sanctuary. From here, I look out on the birds, trees, outside fireplace in my yard and the soft, old, forested mountains.  I come here every morning and a part of my job now is to be a witness to all of this life. Here, I explore the lessons of life I am to learn. I’m in school again, it seems.

Here, I awaken. I notice. I look. I observe. I sit with wordless prayer and I also speak a line or two to the Creator of all this beauty.

About thirty years ago, I attended a conference with Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson and Richard Foster, the heavyweights of the world I now traverse. When I heard them then, I was in my early 40’s.  Now, thirty years later, what I observed from those “old birds” is more true, than ever before.  Willard, Peterson and Foster all illustrated their talks about watching the birds. I clearly remember this. I don’t think it was planned for them to pull their illustrations from the same file of nature’s winged friends, but they all three did. It was like a Trinity and a transfiguration of holy men all gathered in one place saying the very same thing. It felt important and it was and it still is.

I remember thinking to myself in listening to their talks and sermons during that meeting, “Good grief, on top of everything I’m doing as  a pastor of an emerging and exploding church, leading deacons, doing funerals, performing baptisms and weddings every Saturday, and writing sermons to deliver four times every single Sunday, I would also need to add birdwatching to my list of “to do’s”—if I was ever to be a man like the three of them.”  It seemed so ridiculous, if the truth be known. It seemed like a luxury—a spiritual indulgence that I had little time for.

I see if differently now. My new work here is what that little flock of mighty teachers can teach me.  There are lessons every day, if I am awake to notice.

I took my yellow pad and pen, set by my rocking chair this morning, and wrote this poem titled “These Feathered Friends.”  For they are my friends—my community—my teachers—my preachers and my theologians. I tend to them and clean out the bird houses for the next brood is surely to appear any day. I fill the feeders, then I climb the steps into my glass church and watch. I watch. I think. I pray. I notice. And in all of this, strangely, I am ministered to in my own heart and soul.