Believe the Bird

March 01, 2024 1 Comment

There once lived a gifted artist by the name of John James Audubon. James, as he liked to be called, loved to sketch and paint all kinds of wild life, but most of all, he loved to sketch and paint birds. John James Audubon could paint a picture of a bird that looked so real, you would almost think the thing could fly. He became so famous for his depictions of birds in the wild that people starting exhibiting his artwork and publishing it in books. Some of his work made its way into field guides, so that birdwatchers could identify what kind of bird they were looking at through their windows or out on their nature hikes.

Occasionally, though, there was a problem. Occasionally, the bird in the tree would not look like the bird in the guide book. The bird in the tree might have feathers of the wrong color perhaps, or a different shape to its beak, or the wrong sized toes. These aberrations confused people, and so, one day, some brave bird watcher brought this problem to Audubon's attention. Being an intelligent man, Audubon cleared the problem right up.

"When the book and the bird disagree," he said, "always believe the bird."

You see, John James Audubon knew that even though he was a supremely gifted artist, God was a better one. Audubon only made bird pictures. They were ideal birds, but they came from the brush of Audubon and not from the hand of God. All that Audubon's birds ever did was sit on a page and look good. They never molted or flew into windows. Their feathers were never bloody or dirt stained. They never sang bright songs in the morning light or called to each other in the lonely darkness. They never spread their wings and soared against the sky.

I grew up in a very small town where the streets were lined with maple trees and the trees were full of birds. I don't remember actually seeing all that many birds, but their songs were a constant melody in the background of my life and their white poop was always splattered all over the parked cars that I passed on my way to school. I started grade school in a little brick building that sat on a hill at the end of Main Street. I liked school, but I didn't have any friends there, because at recess, while all the other girls were playing jump rope and Rock, Paper, Scissors, I was drifting aimlessly around the playground repeating random words to myself. The other kids at St. Francis collected Fischer Price People, Barbie dolls and Matchbox cars. I collected words. Every new word that entered my private collection was arranged and rearranged many times, first in my head and then aloud. Sometimes I made the words into simple rhymes, but more often, I just strung random words together like you would string beads on a necklace, just to see how they fit together, how they sounded in my ears or felt moving past my lips. "Saying my words", I called it. My classmates made fun of me, and although I was often humiliated and sometimes hurt, I didn't stop saying my words.

My third-grade teacher, a very kind lady, gently informed me that my habit of talking to myself was disrupting the class. After that, instead of saying my words out loud, I began to whisper them. The poor teacher was more disturbed by my whispered litany than she had been by the louder version. She called my mother in for a meeting. I was not present for that meeting, but my mother told me about it years later, her voice shaking with laughter and a hint of remembered anxiety as she recalled the teacher's well-meant advice to take me to psychiatrist. I do remember, very clearly however, the afternoon that my mother came outside to where I was sitting under the maple tree that grew next to our driveway.

"Karen, why were you sitting there talking to yourself?" she asked me anxiously. "Is something bothering you?"

"Oh no." I replied nonchalantly. "I just like words - and I like trees."

My mother was silent for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably less than a minute. Finally, she said, "So you talk to yourself all day just because you like words?"

Well, hearing it put so bluntly did make it seem rather odd, perhaps even slightly creepy. So, I searched around in my ever expanding collection for the words I needed to explain to my mother that when I encountered a new word during the school day, or even some old word that someone had used in a new way, it was absolutely necessary for me to keep repeating it over and over again so that I would not lose it. I tried to impress upon my mother how important it was for me to capture every word that I met up with and that none of them escape my snare. My mother was mostly silent during this rambling exposition, although she did ask a couple of delicate questions. Later that night, just before bed time, she called me into the kitchen where she was sitting at the table. She was simultaneously swinging one leg, tapping her fingers on the table and chain smoking. She had the look of a pressure cooker right before it started shrieking. I sat down somewhat nervously.

"Honey, your teacher has a problem!" my mother blurted out.

"She does? What kind of problem?" I asked.

"Well, it really bothers her when you talk to yourself." said my mother.

I quickly manufactured a surprised expression, because by then of course, I was well aware that "saying my words" drove my teacher batty.

"It does?" I asked in totally fake surprise.

"Yes, it does," said my mother, "I guess it really gets on her nerves, poor lady. So, I was thinking that maybe you could stop talking to yourself at school." She finished this sentence in a blind rush, like someone ordered to speak at gunpoint.

I was appalled that my mother could ask such a sacrifice of me. It was the only time in my life that I ever doubted her love. "Well, I don't know," I stuttered. "What if I find some really, really good words and then I forget all about them?"

Now, here comes a very important part of this story, maybe the most important part - because my mother could have said a whole lot of words here that would have resulted in me becoming a very different person than I am; words that could have condemned, shamed and diminished me, thereby giving me the idea that condemning, shaming and diminishing other people was okay. But she did not say any of those words - not one. What she said was:

"Well, I guess that is a problem, but don't worry honey, we'll figure something out."

And she sent me off to bed, my faith in her restored, along with my faith in myself and in the God who created me. I would not have to give up my words. My mother would find a way for me to keep them. I knew, in my heart, that my mother did not understand my preoccupation with "saying my words - anymore than my teacher did. I could tell that my weird habit made her nervous, even fearful, but her love for me, her belief in me was stronger than her discomfort, stronger than her fear of this thing about me that she did not understand.

The next morning, before I left for school, my mother took the small notebook that she used for phone messages off the kitchen counter and tucked it into my yellow folder.

"Keep this in your desk at school," she instructed me, "and when you find a word that you really like, write it down. That way you won't forget it."

When I was thirteen, my mother bought me a diary for Christmas. When I was sixteen, she bought me a typewriter. Somewhere in between those two events, my words had begun to arrange themselves into poems and my poems had begun to arrange themselves into stories. Until I was a senior in high school, no one in the world, outside my immediate family, ever knew about my word addiction, but that year, my college prep English teacher, Mrs. Hewig, noticed it.

"Karen has such an incredible gift with words." she told my mother at the high school honors banquet. It was the first time anyone had ever referred to my weird compulsion as "a gift". I was strangely humbled by her compliment, almost embarrassed. I felt like a beggar who'd been sitting on a treasure chest her whole life and hadn't noticed it until some kind stranger happened by and pointed it out.

I have lived over a half a century's worth of days now, and I am still saying my words. These days, I mostly type them on a keyboard, although I sometimes revert to writing them on paper and occasionally, when I'm alone, I still secretly indulge in saying them out loud. There have been only a few days in my life when I have not written a single word - the days when my children were born, the days when my parents died, and a few other occasions when life reached a height or a depth where words could not go. But in between those highs and lows, this gift of words has embellished my ordinary life - enhanced it, like exotic spices stirred into a stew, or a shower of glitter sprinkled over a squiggle of Elmer's glue. I have come to realize that my words are an expression of me, in the same way that I realize that I am an expression of God - as all people are.

I've heard that writers pay more attention to detail than other people. Having never been another person, I don't know if that's true, but I do examine life very closely, particularly the people in it, and here is something shocking that I have discovered in the course of my half century of observation: No person that I have ever encountered, living or dead, is any more or less gifted than any other person. All people are created in the image and likeness of God and it is impossible for any of us to be more or less than that. We might act as if we are less than that, we might express ourselves as less, but we cannot be less. No one can ever be less than they are. When we are most true to ourselves, that is when we are most faithful to God, and that is when our true beauty is expressed most vividly in the world. Van Gogh's Starry Night is such an expression, as is Pachelbel's Canon in D, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Michael Jackson's Moonwalk - as is every gracefully executed sports play, every race run full out and all other acts of boundless trust in our Creator.

I remember standing in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome one summer afternoon, gazing at Michelangelo's Pieta. It is a statue of breathless beauty and haunting tragedy - a Mother, cradling the body of her Son who had dared to be more than the world wanted him to be, who had dared to be himself. Mother and Son were enclosed in bullet proof glass that afternoon, still vulnerable to the attacks of those who might see him as a threat. It is one of society's inexplicable perversions that we only cheer or weep over the expression of certain gifts, while others are feared or condemned, or go completely unnoticed.

"The kingdom of God is like a treasure buried in a field," said Jesus, and like the invisible yeast that makes bread rise, and like a lost coin.

And I wonder, how much of God's kingdom has been beaten back out of fear or buried out of shame? How much of it is disguised as something else? How much of it is dropped like a bad habit and swept under some dull surface, forever lost to the world?

It is true that we must all find a way to live in harmony with our society, our culture and our religion, if we choose one. But we can only live in true harmony with the world as the people we are. We will never be at peace with ourselves or with the God who created us any other way.

Often, people get ideas in their heads about the way other people should look, or the way they should think, speak, love, or otherwise live out their days. Then they draw up a chart or a test, or write a book, or a doctrine to show the world their ideal people. They are like John James Audubon, painting pictures of perfect birds that are never going to sing or fly.

Other people – and their opinions, charts, books, tests and doctrines - can only tell us who they think we should be. God, in his infinite wisdom, gave us billions of living cells to tell us who we are.

So, when the book and the bird disagree, for God's sake, I always believe the bird.