SEIZE THE DAY

For weeks now, there has been this small bird singing outside my living room window.  You have never heard such a happy song.  I don’t know what makes birdsong sound happy or sad.  I just know that this bird seems thrilled with life. 

I figured that maybe she was building a nest.  I thought about my planter on the front porch.  Maybe she had found a spot in the gutter or in a nearby tree.

But I absolutely, for sure, no doubt about it, knew where she hadn’t built a nest.

There was no way she had built a nest on the porch post that had been the spot for previous house finch nests.  In the two and a half years that I have lived there, a house finch has built a nest there four times and only once has that nest been successful.  Only once have little babies birds hatched, thrived and flown away.

The other three times have been heartbreakingly depressing.

I got tired of the depressing.

So last year I put a fake bird on top of that post to deter nest building.

And it has worked.  I mean what kind of bird builds its nest on an object that has no flat surfaces, let alone builds a nest on something that resembles another bird’s head?

I’ll tell you what kind of bird—my happy little singing bird has built her nest there.

I can’t imagine a scenario where this turns out well, but still that bird sings.

Last week when Ceilia mentioned an osprey nest she had seen on vacation, I told her that where I lived in Florida, the utility companies would put spikes on top of electric poles to deter osprey from nesting.

Spikes seem a little harsh to me, but fortunately it was not every pole.  I told Ceilia there was a pole across the street from a Publix that housed an osprey nest.  Osprey will use any materials for their nest and in this case, they had used plastic Publix bags, to which Ceilia responded, “Reduce, reuse, recycle!”

One of the things that I loved every spring in Florida was watching the baby birds hatch, the Great Blue Herons, the osprey, the egrets, the Sandhill Cranes—one year we were treated to swan hatchlings also known as cygnets.  I also rejoiced over other births, like the baby alligators emerging from the reeds in the wetlands. 

I also hated that time of year because a lot of birds and gators didn’t make it.  The world—nature is an unforgiving place.  Not everything makes it.   We celebrate new life even as we know that death awaits us all.

Last week I shared lines from one of Dylan Thomas’ poems “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” which includes the line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Another one of my favorite poems is a sonnet-like or sonnet-ish poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins entitled Spring and Fall: To a Young Child and begins with this line, “Margaret are you grieving/over goldengrove unleaving?”  The poem presents a scene where a girl, Margaret, is crying in autumn because the leaves are falling.  With lines like, “Ah! As the heart grows older/you will come to such sights colder,” the poem concludes that Margaret is not crying over the falling leaves but is crying because she has suddenly become aware that things do die and that she herself is mortal.  The final two lines read, “It is the blight man was born for/it is Margaret you mourn for.”

In today’s reading from Matthew 27:45-54, we hear lines typically reserved for Good Friday, to be read during the Passion.  We hear Jesus’ final words on the cross.  We hear the rumors of Elijah.  There is an earthquake.  Rocks split open.  The dead rise from their tombs and a centurion declares, “Truly this man was God’s son.”

Recently, when I was writing about empathy and how reading, especially reading fiction helps build our empathetic muscles, I mentioned a line I had read that basically said the most radical act of empathy the universe has ever seen happened when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Jesus’ death on the cross is heartbreaking.  His torture is gut-wrenching.  His cry in today’s reading, “My God, My God, why have Your forsaken me,” reveals a sense of isolation and abandonment that I think many of us can relate to at one time or the other.

I have been known to shed a few tears during the passion play at church every Easter season.  We enter that space with Jesus.  But Jesus’ death on the cross is something truly revelatory because we shouldn’t be crying with grief, we should be crying with the knowledge that is how much God loved us.  He wanted us to know that we are worthy.  We are worthy.  We are precious in His sight.

And so He became one of us.

And death is part of life.

We cannot die if we never lived.

And Jesus lived.  He lived.  He lives.

He loved.  He laughed.  He cried.

He banged his knee on the table getting up after dinner.

He got hungry.  He knew thirst.  He had favorite foods.

He had favorite people.

Jesus showed us just how precious life is, how precious we are, the human race.

The fact that we will all die means that we must grab hold of every second and wring out the meaning and the love and the worth of each thing that happens during the day.

Someone pointed out to me last week that the poem by Dylan Thomas was in the Robin Williams movie, Dead Poet’s Society.

We also got another famous saying out of that movie … Carpe Diem.  Seize the day.

Life is precious precisely because it is finite. 

It is why just yesterday, when I turned down the alley to my house, and I saw a mama deer and two of her spotted fawns, I cried, because I was struck by the beauty of new life but at the same time already worrying that those two fawns might not make it.  I had to force myself back inside when the mama deer and the one fawn leaped over a neighbor’s fence, but the other smaller fawn was too small to make the jump.  That fawn kept looking at me and when it began to tremble, I knew I was scaring it, so I went back inside and I tried to comfort myself with this—mama deer and her fawns have been losing each other and finding each other for as long as there have been deer. 

Such is life.

And for those few moments, those precious seconds that I looked in that fawn’s eyes and it looked at me—I will hold—I will count those seconds as a precious blessing.

That little bird that sings on that very precariously perched nest, she sings because today warrants song.

Carpe diem my friends.

Amen.