Pure Gift, Pure Grace

Ivory Billed Woodpeckers by James Audubon

While in Sitka this past weekend my friend Fr. Andy, the Catholic pastor there mentioned that he thought bird watching was a particularly good pastime for priests and deacons.  Some of his reasons were obvious, others less so. 

• Bird watching gets you out of the house and outdoors, walking around.  
• Its an education in paying close attention.  
• It involves silently looking and listening.  
• Its a contemplative, even prayerful activity.  
• Watching birds involves actual and not virtual reality. 
• And its got just enough competition built into to keep most guys interested (eg. the sacred "life list".)

I'm just a civilian when it comes to birdwatching (although I'm thinking that after our conversation it may be time to get my binoculars and start watching).  I wonder too if watching birds might be a kind of pedagogy in the transcendence and mystical presence of God. 

Transcendent, because like God, wild birds are entirely other - they exist in an reality that may intersect with ours, but which we are unable to participate in except by analogy or imitation.

Mystical, because like God, these creatures are beings entirely outside of our control.   Birds appear and disappear as they please.  They can't be summoned up at will or controlled by us.  Rather, their presence is pure gift, pure grace.   

Longing is the Core of Mystery

Longing is the core of mystery

Longing itself brings the cure.

The only rule is: Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,

and what you want to happen

In time, sacrificed.

                                                Rumi

 

Its been two weeks since my wife Paula and I were in Sitka for the Sitka Rumi Festival.  ( Due to the ferry schedule we  only made Day Three of the festival.  But we did have the chance to listen to Coleman Barks, Rumi's best known American translator/interpreter read from his poetry.  Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Mevlana or Rumi, was a 13th century Sufi mystic, Islamic scholar and poet. He lived and wrote during an amazing flowering of Christian, Jewish and Muslim mystical writing and poetry.  

In our own time, Rumi (in Bark"s modern translations) has reportedly become the most popular poet in the United States.  The increasing enthusiasm for this Persian mystical poet has been occurring during a marked decrease in religious observance/identification by Americans, as more and more people, especially millenials, identify as 'spiritual but not religious.'  It would be easy to dismiss the popularity of a mystic like Rumi as yet another example of the desire for individual mystical experience, for ecstatic experience without the demanding discipline and self-denial required of anyone serious about the spiritual life.

But I wonder if the compelling attraction of a mystical poet like Rumi can be attributed more to amazement that religion has a mystical dimension at all.  I wonder if for too many Christians, faith in Jesus has been presented more like a series of philosophical propositions or moral regulations than as a deep and unquenchable longing for friendship and communion with God filled with paradox, wonder, ecstatic joy and perplexing unknowing.  Unfortunately, our own rich and abundant mystical tradition embodied in the writings of mystics such as St, Bernard of Clairvaulx, St.Francis of Assisi, St.Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and many, many others is unknown to too many followers of Jesus.