Happy New Year! Today is the first SJT (Spiritual Journey Thursday) of the year. Our host today is Margaret (thanks for hosting, Margaret!) and our topic is our OLW, or One Little Word, for 2025.
Once again I have given my OLW a lot of thought, and once again I am sticking with the same word. This is the third year I will be using the word Feather. Here is what I wrote about this word in 2023, when it was mostly about lightness, and here are my reflections from 2024, in which I shared a poem by Matthew Brenneman that included the line "there's something to be said/For feathering a kind of heaven/On a few
twigs and some frayed bits of thread,/From what she finds that she is
given." In 2024 I continued gathering feathers on my birding walks and sticking them in bottles and containers in my house and on my desk at work. At this time of my life they seem appropriate decorations for my empty nest - ephemeral and fragile and yet tough as all get-out. In 2025 all those resonances of feathers will, I imagine, continue to be important to me. I still want to cultivate and collect lightness and beauty and stop taking everything so seriously all the time. But I've just been reading the book below, so here's some more of what I'm learning and thinking about: John Stott, well-known theologian and birder who died in 2011, has a chapter about the passages from the Bible in
which God is compared to a female bird who is sheltering her chicks
under her wings. Another picture of feathers.
This image of God's protection is a complicated one, because I always think of the people around the world who suffer so much, who are seemingly abandoned by God's lovingkindness. In Haiti, for example, over 700,000 people are internally displaced, chased from their homes by ruthless gangs. And those are the people who have survived the massacres of this past year. Oh God, extend the shelter of your feathers to these innocent victims!
Book #1 of 2025 was The Birds Our Teachers by John Stott. This book appears to be out of print, so I've linked to the least expensive version I can find on Amazon. I bought my copy at a warehouse of used books in Mukono, Kampala. The books were shipped here from other countries where they were donated, and they are being sold by an NGO to fund their work. I've been wanting to read this book for a long time. Is it fanciful to imagine that some kind of providence brought it here to this city where I unexpectedly find myself? Can I believe that and at the same time hold room in my brain for people living with next to nothing on the streets or in the parks and schools and gymnasiums of another city where I found myself for 25 years? And living there not because of an earthquake, as happened in 2010, but because of their own countrymen? How can I believe that God's care for me goes as far as to send me the books I need to read exactly when I need them, and yet other people don't even have the modest places to live that they used to? I'm not sure, but I'm grateful that one of the boxes I went through looking for books for our school library had this one, and that for a few thousand shillings, I was able to bring it home.
10 comments:
I love reading your thoughts about feathers and that you are finding still more useful things about them.
Thinking about people who are suffering so greatly reminded me of Viktor Frankl and his logotherapy, which I just heard about recently.
Ruth, as I tried to express in my post, we only know a small part of God. I think we believe what we need to believe to make it through. There are glimmers everywhere if we pay attention to them. You are a watcher, a thinker. Your gifts come inside books and in your quiet habit of bird watching. God is with all those in peril as well, but in a different way. I am reminded of the resilience of the enslaved people. (I am reading Jesmyn Ward's book Let Us Descend.) They found hope somehow. Hope is all we have. It's the thing with Feathers!
Ruth, when I think of feathers I think of the wings of a bird, wings that help them fly above the ground. Metaphorically, feathers can help us rise above the problems we face, see then in a new perspective, and maybe come up with solutions. Bob
Ruth, I was happy to read your thoughts about how so many can be suffering in Haiti while you find a book in Kampala. God is at work in both ways? This is not easy, but I did appreciate reading Margaret's comment about hope, the thing with feathers. Lovely. I'm sure you will continue to process and grow through this light and airy, warm and sheltering word.
Hello Ruth, Linda M. here. Thank you for your wonderful and thoughtful post. It never occurred to me that I could use a OLW over...yet alone over again! What a really good idea. It gives you much more time to meditate and follow an idea all the way through. I've been grappling with suffering in the world in a similar way. I am also a thinker. Margaret's post and comments about only knowing a small part of god comforts me. Thank goodness I cannot know it all. I am grateful to get to your comments page today! The interwebs must want us to communicate ;) Here I go, pushing send (after copying this comment just in case).
Ruth, your word feathers offers me a chance to feel the lightness of the world instead of heaviness. I think back on all the beautiful feathers I collected in my life. At that time, I did not know about a one word leading me on. Now, it is a beautiful guide. I always love to hear of your travels, birding, and how you look at life. I wish you well and hope that our spiritual pathways are full of wonder, joy, and feathers that move gently in the wind.
I really like your thoughts on feathers at this time of your life. And I share your questions - or at least, similar ones - about how God's love can be so real and personal in the midst of so much in the world that's incomprehensible.
I'm so glad you have that book. I have it too, which I now appreciate in a new way thanks to your post. In the interest of simulating a book group over time and distance, here's my review from 2012: https://www.acrossthepage.net/2012/09/the-birds-our-teachers/
Janet, I see I had commented on that review! Well, I did say I'd wanted to read this book for a long time!
Ruth: Like you I am gathering feathers. I found a lovely gray one today. I like to show children how a drop of water soaks into their clothes, but rolls off a feather - so fearfully and wonderfully made. I look forward to reading more from you. Hopeful, and with feathers!
I find it interesting to see the ways we are connected over time and space. I wonder if Janet's post sparked your interest in the book or perhaps it was already on your radar b/c of your love of birds. I can't think of Haiti without thinking of you and your years with the people.
It's hard to understand the tender ways God's love is manifest to us and then wonder about so many who suffer in our world. These are the questions we ponder and the reason I love to write with this group. Not a deep thinker myself, I find that this group nudges me in good ways to think more deeply.
Have another lovely year with feathers!
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