I’m sitting on my enclosed porch praying Morning Prayer of the Church while it’s still dark outside. It’s winter and soon the eastern sky’s early pink glow will alert the local birds to remind me to feed them.
A male sparrow watches me in the morning.
Lord, I am thanking you for another day with all its possibilities. Most of the time, when I sit out here, I’m hoping you’ll surprise me sometime during the day with an unexpected phone call or a visitor. If this turns out to be one those days when I have fatigue most of the day, I’ll try to adapt, though the full hamper of laundry stares at me. I nudge myself back to the recitation of the psalms of the day. back to realizing that You are present.
Soon the neighborhood begins to light up, and the local house sparrows come and sit on the railings which lead up the ramp to my outside porch. Snow and cold out there this A.M. The birds are here every morning and line up, hopping around, chirping away until I grab the bird seed and spread the grains out on at the tiny platform that I’ve installed at the juncture of the outside porch railing and ramp. It holds a cup of seeds.
I can’t use a feeder station because the fat gray squirrel who lives in the maple tree in front of my house is watching. So, I simply scatter a cup of seeds on the platform and railing and watch as house sparrows descend and peck away. In an hour the seeds have vanished, and the squirrel gets nothing.
Cartoonists who in one panel get their idea across have always intrigued me. OK. I’ll try to describe what I mean. Picture a one-gallon fishbowl. The bowl is three-quarters full and in the center two large goldfish are facing one another. The deep-orange one on the right is answering the agnostic and equally colorful brother on the left. He says: “If there’s no God, who feeds us each morning?”
I fantasize that kind of conversation going on among my feathered friends this morning. Maybe they believe the same as the goldfish on the right. I remember Our Lord Jesus, speaking of the value of human life, when He says “Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap but your Father feeds them. Not one sparrow falls to the earth and dies without your Father knowing it. You are of worth more than many sparrows (Mt 10:31).
It has taken me a long time to like sparrows. They are ubiquitous. (I have longed for the opportunity to use that word.) and monotonous in their presence. The darn things are not native to America. Over a century ago, someone let them go in New York City’s Central Park and now they are everywhere. (There was another opportunity for ubiquitous).
The sun is still rising but it’s already lighting up our lives, mine and the sparrows. Right now, the sparrows on the railing outside catch sight of me and renew their chirping and hopping. I better get out there and offer seeds to break their fast of a long winter’s night. They, too, seem to believe there is aa God.