Seeing the World Through The Word
We stood in the dark along the creek’s edge, waiting for the moment when the dawn chorus would begin. “Any bets on the first bird of the day?” David asked, a clipboard and binoculars draped around his neck. “White-throat,” I said. “I bet Cardinal,” he replied. And just then we heard the croak of a Great-blue Heron--a surprising start to the annual Christmas Bird Count.
The Christmas Bird Count is a tradition that has been held annually, across the country, for over a hundred years and it has become as important a date on many birder’s calendars as any holiday festivity. I’ve been participating, off and on, since age ten. It was around that time that my family set up a bird feeder in our back yard, and I began working to identify the common species that showed up there. I’ve been a birder ever since with over 250 species on my Arkansas life list alone.
Birding has been more than a mere hobby for me. Through my walks in the woods, my constant scanning of the skies, I’ve found a practice for prayer, a way of paying attention that few other pursuits allow. The philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “prayer consists of attention” and anything that develops our capacity for attention is an aid to prayer. To go into the woods, to listen carefully to the varied singers, to watch the multi-colored flashes of warblers in the treetops or sort among the browns and greys of shorebirds on the beach--these have all been ways my attention has been gathered, trained, and expanded.
It has become a way of praying with icons, each bird a beautiful, surprising wonder that opens me to see beyond to the God whose love sings beneath the Wood Thrush’s song and from whose beauty the Blackburnian Warbler draws its fiery orange. In my excursions to see birds, I am invited to see a wonder that has always been there but was hidden until I finally looked. In my birding, I’ve begun to glimpse the Word that dwells in all creation, the Word that became flesh so that it could speak in all being of the God who sustains all.
Our Gospel reading this morning, the poetic prologue to John’s gospel, tells us that creation itself is woven from the Word of God, this Word that is Christ and was with God from the beginning—" All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” Christ, this light, was meant to be seen in warblers, the truth of God’s love was to be heard in the laughter of children or witnessed in the aroma of a forest after a rain. Creation, from the beginning, spoke of God because it was made through the Word of God and breathed from His life and echoed His light. Christ was the language in which the book of creation was written.
Some have been able to understand this language when looking at creation. One of the early teachers of the way of St. Francis of Assisi, the medieval theologian Bonaventure, saw in his master an ability to look at creation and know its meaning. When St. Francis looked at creation, Bonaventure said, “in beautiful things, he saw Beauty itself.” Another of Francis’s biographers, Thomas of Celano, wrote that Francis was hesitant to put out a candle because its brightness “is a sign of the eternal light. He walked reverently over rocks, out of respect for Him who is called the Rock.”
The way that Francis saw the world is the way that we all should see it, Bonaventure believed, but we have lost our ability to see through sin. Our eyes have become dim and our attention distracted. We are unable to look at the living world and see Christ or the God of which Christ is a member. That Word, if we can hear it at all, is now lost like a language that no longer makes any sense to us—we have the book of creation but cannot read it or even make out its script.
What we need, now is a guide, someone who can show us again how to see the God who sustains all things and is present to us through the fabric of creation. We need a new image through which we can refocus our attention and learn to see God. This image is the eternal Christ who became incarnate as a human, Jesus who lived here on earth so that we could witness God in the world.
Earlier this fall I went on an offshore birding trip in Monterey Bay, California. Before our boat of birders left the dock, the tour leader talked through the day ahead. She assured us that experts on board would help identify birds we saw and asked us not to get too frustrated with our inability to spot and identify many of the birds. “Most of you, however good you are with land birds, have little experience with sea birds,” she said, “and so you have no image map to help you make identifications.” She explained that as we become familiar with birds we get basic images in our minds that help us understand their basic categories--that this bird is a kind of wren or this a hawk. With no image maps, those of us without experience had no idea of the difference between a shearwater and a storm petrel—twenty different species would just seem like one confusing mass of birds.
Over the day of birding, however, an image map began to take shape. My first shearwater was completely new but once it had been pointed out, I could recognize other shearwaters and by the end of the day I’d encountered thousands of them. What especially helped with this were the experienced guides on board who could call out the birds and help us understand what we were witnessing. “Sooty Shearwater three o’clock” they would call out, “Black-footed Albatross off the stern.” By the end of the trip, many of us were able to join the guides in identifying birds and even calling out new ones. We had gained the image maps that enabled us to identify what had once been a confusing jumble.
I offer this experience because John’s Gospel offers a kind of identification story—how to see God. John the Baptist is like a guide who has learned to recognize God, not the image himself but one who can point it out and say, “Look, the Holy Spirit descending like a dove,” or “Look, Christ come among us in Jesus!” With John’s witness answered in Jesus’s image of the divine, we are offered a way forward, a way we can begin to see the God who dwells in all creation.
In John’s Gospel we discover of a God who is all around us, teaching us, speaking to us, offering us love and truth and beauty. And we are asked, can you see God in the creation? Can you hear God speaking in a child’s laughter, the wind in a tree stretched across the sky, the moan of a man slumped in the doorway? If not, then perhaps we need to slow down and creep along like birders, listening, looking, expecting the Word of God to speak at any moment from any place along our path. When God comes near it will mostly likely be surprising; in a person or place we were least expecting, like an infant in a manger or a criminal crucified. Wherever it is, we will recognize the divine because we’ve spent long hours looking at Jesus, our image of the God who lives. By reading the stories of Jesus, studying the words of his teachings, and being with him in the silence of prayer we are absorbing the image map of the divine. With that image firmly in our minds we can recognize Christ along with the great guides like John the Baptist, saying, “Look, God is here among us, do you see it in the beauty of this bird, do you see it in the face of this friend, do you see it in one another?” Amen.