A few weeks ago, a pair of robins built a nest atop the flood lamp on our back deck. More recently, the female laid eggs there, and is now incubating them with the warmth of her swollen body. Every time she flies into the nest, she positions herself differently – facing this way and that, sometimes pressing down so we can just barely see her head – as she distributes the heat evenly.
Whenever one of us walks out onto the deck, no matter how quietly we open the door, she immediately flies away, perches on a branch of a nearby maple tree, and chirps angrily at us. Legend says that St. Francis of Assisi could communicate with the birds, but we clearly do not have this gift. We insist loudly that we mean no harm. We tell her that, in fact, we eagerly anticipate the birth of her children along with her. But an unbridgeable chasm exists between the robin and us. So, we now avoid stepping onto the deck. And if we want to go into the back yard, we exit out the front door and walk around.
Isaiah 11:6 describes the fulfillment of God’s kingdom as the complete cessation of all divisions, even those between different species of life. “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” So I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to believe that, in that time, human beings will be able to talk to birds. We won’t just co-exist. Robins and cardinals and sparrows won’t need to assume the worst about us. We’ll be able to tell them we enjoy their company and their songs, and we celebrate new life with them every spring.
Ironic, isn’t it, that human beings – all of the same species – so often seem hell-bent on sharpening divisions between us, even though we have everything we need to make peace. We slur each other with our prejudicial generalizations about religion and ethnicity. We objectify whole groups of people as “the other,” as enemies to be destroyed, without even attempting to understand them. In the extreme, this leads to genocide. But even in relatively stable societies (like ours is – at least for now), we hunker down in political and cultural enclaves, insulating ourselves from the possibility that some of our assumptions might be wrong.
For those of us who are in Christ, the deepest desire is to bridge chasms, not create them. You might think I’m a little nutty for wishing I could communicate with the robin nesting on the outside wall of my home. I prefer to think that is a small manifestation of the Christ-consciousness at work in me that always seeks reconciliation. It is not a fairy tale pipe dream. It is a deep longing that God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. It is the yearning of faith that looks toward the fulfillment of God’s reign.
©2016 by J. Mark Lawson
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