February 19, 2007

Tidings: Soul can flame like feathers of a bird.

We have been together long enough to have reminded me a second time (my, how time flies) that it is time to write a note for Tidings, and so I will try. What follows is an architectural endeavor as I think of the flight of birds.

It's Lent (or, nearly), and I've been thinking about this born again stuff. And I have also been thinking about what is to be said on Ash Wednesday, and I've also been thinking about what is to be said on the 1st Sunday of Lent upcoming. There is a relentless demand for words. And so I think of bird song as an alternative, and I think of one of the characters named Bear of a story I am reading by Charles Frazier (of Cold Mountain) Thirteen Moons. Bear believes that the written word kills the spirit of language, its flight. And of all the birds, I think of the thrush, or of many of them that have the most beautiful bird songs because like most all birds they have a syrinx for song, whereas we have a larynx for words; but distinctive to their own species, many of the thrushes have two syrinxes and hence they sing the most beautiful and complex of bird songs. Ah, the morning chorus, how jubilant, how refreshing, and how soon the spring that will have us rise to it, its morning prayer.

And this is what comes to mind: In the beginning was Word, and Word was with God, and Word was God. Somehow I want my words to conform to that Word, to be the eerie song of the dove: I want to speak the truth about the way and the life. I do get a funereal sense, though, as I write of a dying spirit of language as it is put into print, so like a pinned butterfly in an insect collection, an Audubon bird on his canvas. Yet, I know of the demand on the 3rd generation Christians (those who knew a very old person who knew someone who knew one of the apostles as a very old man) to produce a canon of Christian scripture...words, written words, that would delimit the deterioration by word of mouth memory. My, how fabulistic the stories would have become (did in fact become by then)! A canon of words to safeguard the remarkable person of Jesus, Word made flesh, the embodiment of Word, lover of fish and story, and fishers and fish stories.

(And so the not so new insight: we live by and in word. How fragile and conditional is this being! this human being, and Jesus was one of us, these beings, and he died...puff...but his Word was not puffed out, but became a bird with wings.)

We, people--our artists, poets, and saints--represent all things spiritual with wings. And so Jesus bestows upon us his Spirit, and it is something like a dove, and my, what a haunting song is the dove's song. And I think of the feather pillow weight, the smothering weight, of those (flightless birds) who would insist that this Spirit filled Word is just this one thing, and no other. Ah, the polymorphic metaphor: so like the flight of birds--the departures and arrivals--at the bird feeder whose chaotic non-pattern defies logarithmic reduction, yet points to the Strange Attractor originator or word(s).

Here's a few words for you: Abram -- Abraham & Sarai -- Sarah. It's only through the spoken word, not the written, that the aspirated life and significance of these name changes is formulated: God promised to them..., and their very names became inspirited.

I think of James, the epistle, the Straw Epistle Martin Luther called it not overly impressed by its meek moral demands. So also is the tongue a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.

And so for Lent I now know that I am giving up (that is, I will try) all defamatory and derogatory words, all dirty words, all cynical words (that is, words of death, flightless words), all words that narrow and limit flight, life, and imagination; and I will speak (that is, I will try) only words of renewal and rebirth, words that soar and affirm, life giving words, aspirated words, and the song of the dove for the soul can flame like feathers of the bird.