Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young; even thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.
Psalm 84.3
Birds have been a significant part of my sabbatical experience. I was mesmerized by them at Launde from day one, so many busy building their nests or feeding their young, including birds I’d never really seen up close before like the spotted flycatcher, yellowhammer, bullfinch, nuthatch, goldcrest and blackcap. The wonderful, if also frustrating thing about them, was that they were unpredictable. I could go out for a walk with the aim of spotting something but more often than not what I saw would come as a complete surprise, interrupting my meanderings and musings. I wrote in my journal, “These sightings come as a gift. Each day I now go in expectation that there will be some small revelation, some miracle of creation, something to stop and wonder at. If only I got up each day of my normal life with that same expectation.”
The swallows nesting in the eaves were a particular delight once they arrived and reminded me of this verse in Psalm 84. It is such a rich moving psalm and as I returned to it again and again in subsequent days, I found in it an echo of my yearning to be close to God, near to his altars, that thin place of meeting, of grace, of communion. Reading Kosuke Koyama at the time, I was struck by a haiku he used to illustrate a point. I began to experiment with my own haikus and found the formal 5-7-5 structure was just what I needed to distil my thoughts and give them expression (funnily enough, I later read Ruth Thomas’ “The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line” in which the main character goes to a poetry group and experiments with haikus as a form of expression). Watching the swallows, I penned this: Over sun-baked lawns/chasing the invisible/home to hungry mouths… And reflecting on Psalm 84.3 and various nests I found around Launde, I came up with this one: Hole or box or hedge?/Snug in the eaves? Better still/thy altars, O Lord.
Koyama talks about our “creature-feeling”, knowing ourselves created, to be “dust and ashes”, which means knowing both our limitations and our holiness. Such knowledge, according to Koyama, is itself creative. We can learn so much from the rest of creation. John Stott’s “The Birds our Teachers” was a joy to read while enjoying the birds at Launde and his chapter on the worth of sparrows resonated for me with that verse from Psalm 84 even if it wasn’t until I went to Scotland that I finally got to see an abundance of sparrows and swallows together, most notably at Iona Abbey: From ancient eaves swoop/swallows while sparrows squabble/among stones and dust.
I think it was in Nicola Slee’s book that I read that former Archbishop, Rowan Williams had compared prayer to birdwatching: “You sit very still because something is liable to burst into view, and sometimes, of course it means a long day of sitting in the rain with nothing very much happening.” This reminded me very much of Ann Lewin’s poem “Prayer is like watching for the kingfisher“. Sometimes, you only see hints, like the day I saw the earth rippling in front of me as I walked the woodland trail at Launde … a mole on the move, like Wendell Berry’s “unseeable animal”.
One rainy day, I sat in my shepherd’s hut watching a blackbird teaching her young to look for worms and weeping at the vision of a bird-less future in Hosea 4.1-3. I was equally sad when I returned after one weekend in June to find a nest I’d been watching closely now empty. Had the chicks fledged or had something more tragic happened? The emptiness of the nest spoke profoundly as the discovery coincided with reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s little book “When God is Silent”. As she says, “our speech exists in tension with God’s silence.” In searching for words to express our experience of the transcendent, we try to fill the silence, the emptiness, with our stutterings and garbled noise. We’d do better to listen to the birds but if we must use words, BBT advises economy, courtesy and reverence. It strikes me that haikus offer a promising way to do all three. Wendell Berry’s “How to be a poet” includes the following lines: Out of the silence, like prayers/prayed back to the one who prays,/make a poem that does not disturb/the silence from which it came.
The idea that the silence or hiddenness of God could actually be a gift, the emptiness being just what I need to call forth a response in me, was a helpful one to then take with me into my retreat at the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield. On my first day the brothers sang the Thomas Aquinas hymn, “Thee we adore, o hidden Saviour, thee”.
The depth of silence and peace when being led in prayer (and unable even to join in the singing due to Covid) was something I have rarely experienced and it brought me to tears on more than one occasion, especially at the Vigil of the Resurrection which has never been part of my tradition. My experience at Mirfield brought me face to face not so much with my inability to rest this time but with my failure to make prayer the “wellspring of my ministry”. It dawned on me that if my ministry has been built on prayer, it is not mine but the prayers of the wonderful saints around me, those who work alongside me and support me in countless ways, those I know pray for me and my ministry regularly. But I have taken a vow to be “diligent in prayer” and I need to remember that and keep praying for my heart to daily be enlarged, for my understanding of the scriptures to be enlightened and for the gift of the Holy Spirit as it says in the Ordinal.
Apologies if you were hoping to read some amazing words of wisdom or the key to happiness or a 5 point plan to improve your prayer life. In working on the research for my doctorate, there is a significant emphasis on making an original contribution to the field but nothing of what I have learnt on sabbatical is new. I’ve had my eyes opened to it in a new way perhaps but that is all and that’s ok. I don’t need to justify my sabbath time beyond it being a pivotal commandment. There isn’t much more I could ask for as I leave the woods for now and return to work in the fields. The harvest is plentiful and the workers may be few, but there is no easy solution or quick fix to be found, only a response that is called for, not to work ourselves into the ground but to return to what we already know, not least those divine commands to rest (Exodus 20.8) and to pray (Luke 11.1-4). In fact, I wonder if nothing could be more challenging to the prevailing culture at this time and nothing more potentially transformative for the church.
Back home this week, I have watched two pigeons gathering small twigs and nesting materials from the bottom of the garden. Seeing them fly back and forth I was reminded of the dove (or was it a pigeon?) with its olive branch that was a sign to Noah that life was finally re-emerging after the flood … To and fro they flap/nest-building parents-to-be/one twig at a time.
In returning and rest you shall be saved, in quietness and trust shall be your strength.
Isaiah 30.15
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