The Wing-Beat

Some loved ones create delight by keeping their bird feeders stocked (with the avian-approved, “good stuff”) and waiting for the delight.  Hours of it come in flashes of cardinals, blue jays, orioles, finches, variegated blackbirds, black-capped chickadees, mourning dove, sparrows, and the seasonal many others.  They are delight on the wing, “wingborne” snatches of a common grace present in the general environment but focused at the feeders.  Yes, there are the fat squirrels and the after-dusk racoons, interlopers in something not intended for them, but who are they to turn down a good deal in that extension of common grace?  All are distinctive, and all take part in what is offered.

That wingborne delight comes from the givers’ provision.  The “good stuff” is not cheap, nor is it second-rate, the kind some birds turn away from–they understand stingy giving and simply choose something else.  The givers give for the sake of present and anticipated joy, liberally, and they get to share in grace redoubled.  It all comes from a life-attitude, not a singular, selfish desire just to enjoy the local wildlife, but to show they share somehow in a common life borne of a common provision.  It is so with the birds and is potentially true for all their relationships!  As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. 

The Father provides, and so do his children.  Grace is a gift received and given.  Providence is divine, but people pass it on to others.  It is not only spiritual or only material, mostly these are inseparable in the gift.  Either way or together, through the Spirit there is provision and there is delight.  It is the wingborne foundation for a life of joy. 

Our international culture lore and our use of domesticated birds abounds with the birds and the “wing-beat” of their work and significance:  storks bring children to parents; the hummingbirds–Mayan divinities incarnate–do they not sip the gods’ nectar?  The gospel dove descending upon the Son of Man (or in gospel songs on people as the Great Speckled Bird or the Snow White Dove); the swallows heralding spring at San Juan Capistrano; the American Bald Eagle, bird of peace first, then war; the albatross of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; the California Sespe condors–a weak flock though they are outsized fowl.  The pampered peafowl of India.  Moving closer to our hearts, and table habits, the Thanksgiving Turkey (the wild turkey does indeed fly, yes, Sir, Mr. Franklin of Philadelphia and the Pilgrims of Plymouth!), and, just as with the chicken-domesticators of the Indus Valley, 6,000 b.c.e., do we not all (well, most of us) partake of the yardbird, aided these days by the Arkansas Tysons and the Texas Pilgrims?  And eggs, too. 

About the wing-beat, in another entry.

R. Scott Rodin’s latest is The Steward Leader: Transforming People, Organizations and Communities (Intervarsity, 2010).  Already I know the book demands a careful, deep reading (or, more accurately, like Scripture itself, the book demands a deep reading of the reader!).  I want to mention by way of quotation Rodin’s take on honesty and humility in leadership; these are suitable, pithy statements from his first chapter.

. . . when God uses any of us to lead effectively, it is nothing short of a miracle. When we place the complex and demanding role of a godly leader next to an honest self-awareness of our sinfulness and incompetence, we are thrown wholly on the grace of God and his faithfulness if we are ever to lead anyone anywhere. (20)

. . . great, godly leaders have always worked at that miraculous intersection where humility and faith meet the awesome presence and power of God’s Spirit–and the miracle of leadership happens. (21)

Lest anyone mistake his drift, godly leaders are first servants, always.

To read the Christian classics old or new is to wander eventually into the thought-realms of Augustine or Aquinas–that’s what happens regularly–and I suppose it was Merton, decades ago, with stronger doses of Lewis, that fed my appetite.  Presently A. G. Sertillanges (The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. Mary Ryan from the French) is asking the hard questions and giving seasoned direction, though among others Aquinas stands invisible though perceptible with his hand on Sertillanges’ shoulder.   What about my work, your work?  Consider:

Everyone in life has his work; he must apply himself to it courageously and leave to others what Providence has reserved for others. We must keep from specialization as long as our aim is to become cultivated men, and, as far as concerns those to whom these pages are addressed, superior men; but we must specialize anew when we aim at being men with a function, and producing something useful.  In other words, we must understand everything, but in order to succeed in doing some one thing. (120)

Sertillanges assumed the role of the liberal arts for general, foundational preparation, but he recognized the role for each person to work toward aptitudes, to excel in  special vocation, and to so excel by a “probing of the depths” that all of knowledge and understanding is enhanced.  (119-120)

This hews closely to life in community and in the church: one may not be all things to all the people, but one certainly may strive to be the epitome, the best, in serving out of giftedness.  One’s singular service makes all the difference in the particular and in the whole.

Marvelous, delightful, Pappadeaux Salad (mine had grilled chicken).  It is not like the others.

I cannot resist musing about the avaunts in the concents of Stephenson’s Anathem who just might occasionally suffer from the acedia Kathleen Norris exposes in her new book Acedia & me:  a marriage, monks, and a writer’s life. Can you see, with me, the auts (avaunts) poking their heads out their doors and windows to see what everyone else is doing?

And among the four groups — the Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — does the denomination suggest its members vary in their ability to cope with “the noonday demon” called acedia?  Do the Millennarians, who are allowed to emerge once every thousand years, have a special gift of focused discipline that allows them to endure?  Or do the others do better?  How do they vary in their encounters with boredom, or depression, or apathy?  Stephenson may have some answers from the geek-sci-fi- side; I’m reading Norris for hers.

Here’s an entry to build on past this evening. What do techno-hypermodernism, medieval monastics, and we in our own frictional existence have in common?

9/16–The primary reference is to Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which should be in release since September 9th.  (See the article in the Sep 2008 Wired .) Set on the planet Arbe where the people are either the Saecular (anti-environmental consumerist, sybaritics) or the monastic avaunts or auts who live and think amid ritual in the mathic world inside walled concents (sounds a bit like “cloisters,” eh?).  The four divisions of auts — Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — are free to venture out of their assigned or chosen (?) concents according to classification:  by year, decade, century, and millennium.

Time is the central focus.

Already this sounds restrictive.  But suppose there could be an inversion of socio-cultural values that prized slowed time rather than life-lived-at-ever-increasing-velocity-with-no-end-in-sight — and decreasing returns on one’s efforts?

Some things to consider short of further comment for today:

First, the Christian tradition holds and provides an ideal, or varieties of the ideal, for maximizing time:  one in forms of the monastic tradition; another in expressions of Pietism; and another in personal expressions of piety and devotion, to name three examples.  And then — shall we never forget? — Sabbath, with an extra bolt of wisdom from the Israelitic/Judaic tradition.

Second, Jesus said something about rest; perhaps we should attend to that, too.

More later . . . .

So, Advent is “Coming,” and we grapple with mystery. Some of us with abstractions, others with personal fervor. Can one who has in delight cradled a newborn transfer all the reciprocal sensations into his or her heart — the center of being, of life? The “Yes” is possible because we are whole, integrated beings, whose cradling arms enable our hearts to cradle the Child, or is it the other way around? Read more…

What about Pentecostal Scientology? It was in the news this morning. I’ll bet L. Ron Hubbard never anticipated that combination, but he and his ilk shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Scientology is but one of the synthetic, or to use a term Catherine Albanese has used (A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A History of American Metaphysical Religion) to describe popular religious habits, combinative groups or cults that take their cues from various metaphysical teaching traditions and teachings. Read more…

Spring on the Plains! and the Red River Valley. Well, not just yet, but soon. The weekend’s winds kicked up some 3-4 foot troughs on Texoma Saturday. They brought some more of New Mexico, West Texas, and western Oklahoma eastward, too, so there must have been a bit of dust-storming westward. I’m sure there will be more of the same in March. This year we have had “more” winter on the South Plains and the upper-Gulf Coast continental shelf. That has meant more rain than in recent years. But Texoma was still low. Other lakes are low. We need more rain, still. I hope it comes in the right places.