On a mid-December morning, the first truly cold day of the season, one hardly expects to encounter a miracle.
While the world around me hustled and bustled toward Christmas, reveling in the magic of the season, life was happening quite as normal for me. The administrative tasks of preparing for Christmas - both at church and on the homefront - were stripped of magic by their sheer necessity. Besides, as a pastor, I feel especially compelled to keep Advent, and to delay the light and wonder of Christmas until the arrival of the Christmas season on December 25 (or at least the evening of the 24th). And so it was an extremely ordinary morning. Under gray skies, I drove Sam to daycare and helped him pull off his hat and mittens before relinquishing him to his classroom teachers and toys. I left the building, beginning to calculate the tasks of the day.
As I reached to pull the handle of my car door, a noise started building across the street and caused me to look up. Across the road, perched in the very chilly waters of a retaining pond, were a few hundred geese. The noise that I heard was their growing chorus of squaks and honks. Just as I began to pay attention to this chorus, which had begun as a lone voice and now rose to a passionate crescendo, all of the geese, in an instant, pulsed their wings and took off from the pond, calling to one another and rising into the air with a rush of flight.
Like a school of fish, they moved through the air in one motion, circling the pond, round and round. With each pass, they began to organize themselves into a massive "V" shape. The sight and sound of the maneuver took over my senses, and I stood with my car keys hanging limply in my hand, my mouth very literally hanging open in wonder at the size and scale of what I was witnessing.
The geese continued to call out and to circle, and from over the trees along the ridges of the far-off bluffs appeared more geese, tiny specks of black in the sky, growing as they came nearer to the whirlwind. And then more geese, arriving from over the hills off to my right. And more, flying in from the north.
I do not know what invisible signal set the geese in the pond in motion. I do not know whether it was razor instinct, or keen hearing, or a change in the wind that drew hundreds more geese toward this gathering. But before my eyes gathered a dark cloud of flapping wings, a loud burst of bird-cry, a circling mass of winged creatures summoned to flight by an imperceptible signal that it was time to pick up and go.
When all had gathered, save a few stragglers, the "V" widened to include all travelers, and then departed, moving south toward warmer skies.
It is rare and humbling to catch a glimpse of the mystery of nature - the peculiar behavior of plants or creatures that need neither language nor reason to enact complicated, beautiful processes at exactly the appointed time. Left up to our own human devices, we might likely make unholy disaster out of a life lived off of intuition and impulse rather than thought, reason, and intention.
But what would it be like, if even just for a moment, we were to stop trying so hard to order things and control them, and instead tap into the grander pulse of God's created universe? What would it feel like to be open to life happening exactly on its own mystical schedule, and not at our devised and appointed times? Might we catch more invisible signals to fly if we gave up even a little bit of the illusion that making order of the universe is the responsibility of human striving, rather than the responsibility of the God who in the moment of creation brought order to the chaos of the swirling deep?
Might the image of geese rising at an invisible signal to fly be one fitting image for us of the prodding of the Spirit, the voice that calls from the deep that we cannot hear with our ears, but instead hear with our souls?
Friends, is it time to rise?
While the world around me hustled and bustled toward Christmas, reveling in the magic of the season, life was happening quite as normal for me. The administrative tasks of preparing for Christmas - both at church and on the homefront - were stripped of magic by their sheer necessity. Besides, as a pastor, I feel especially compelled to keep Advent, and to delay the light and wonder of Christmas until the arrival of the Christmas season on December 25 (or at least the evening of the 24th). And so it was an extremely ordinary morning. Under gray skies, I drove Sam to daycare and helped him pull off his hat and mittens before relinquishing him to his classroom teachers and toys. I left the building, beginning to calculate the tasks of the day.
As I reached to pull the handle of my car door, a noise started building across the street and caused me to look up. Across the road, perched in the very chilly waters of a retaining pond, were a few hundred geese. The noise that I heard was their growing chorus of squaks and honks. Just as I began to pay attention to this chorus, which had begun as a lone voice and now rose to a passionate crescendo, all of the geese, in an instant, pulsed their wings and took off from the pond, calling to one another and rising into the air with a rush of flight.
Like a school of fish, they moved through the air in one motion, circling the pond, round and round. With each pass, they began to organize themselves into a massive "V" shape. The sight and sound of the maneuver took over my senses, and I stood with my car keys hanging limply in my hand, my mouth very literally hanging open in wonder at the size and scale of what I was witnessing.
The geese continued to call out and to circle, and from over the trees along the ridges of the far-off bluffs appeared more geese, tiny specks of black in the sky, growing as they came nearer to the whirlwind. And then more geese, arriving from over the hills off to my right. And more, flying in from the north.
I do not know what invisible signal set the geese in the pond in motion. I do not know whether it was razor instinct, or keen hearing, or a change in the wind that drew hundreds more geese toward this gathering. But before my eyes gathered a dark cloud of flapping wings, a loud burst of bird-cry, a circling mass of winged creatures summoned to flight by an imperceptible signal that it was time to pick up and go.
When all had gathered, save a few stragglers, the "V" widened to include all travelers, and then departed, moving south toward warmer skies.
It is rare and humbling to catch a glimpse of the mystery of nature - the peculiar behavior of plants or creatures that need neither language nor reason to enact complicated, beautiful processes at exactly the appointed time. Left up to our own human devices, we might likely make unholy disaster out of a life lived off of intuition and impulse rather than thought, reason, and intention.
But what would it be like, if even just for a moment, we were to stop trying so hard to order things and control them, and instead tap into the grander pulse of God's created universe? What would it feel like to be open to life happening exactly on its own mystical schedule, and not at our devised and appointed times? Might we catch more invisible signals to fly if we gave up even a little bit of the illusion that making order of the universe is the responsibility of human striving, rather than the responsibility of the God who in the moment of creation brought order to the chaos of the swirling deep?
Might the image of geese rising at an invisible signal to fly be one fitting image for us of the prodding of the Spirit, the voice that calls from the deep that we cannot hear with our ears, but instead hear with our souls?
Friends, is it time to rise?