Believe the Bird

April 23, 2006
Westminster Unitarian Church
Barbara Fast


Reading:
A poem written by Ruth Fahs, daughter of Minister and Religious Educator Sophia Fahs. Ruth wrote this poem in 1918 when she was 11:

Where is the really really me?
I'm somewhere. I know, but where can that be?
I'm not my nose, nor my mouth nor my eye,
And I'm not my nose, nor my mouth, or my eye,
And I'm not my feet, nor my legs, nor my thigh.
I'm not my hand, nor my arm, nor my hip,
And I'm not my teeth, nor my tongue, nor my lip.
I'm sure I'm not my elbow or my knee -
Oh, where am I? Oh, where can I be?


Sermon:

Believe the Bird
"When the book and the bird disagree, believe the bird." I read this in an Audubon Birder's calendar: When the book and the bird disagree, believe the bird.
I knew this group of old birds. They gathered themselves for lunch once a month. They would share their memories. They’d listen to each other. This day the topic was  "Where were you in WW 2?"

 A tough old bird rises. “ I was returning home to my apartment. I was pregnant and my two year old was in the stroller. I opened the telegram. It said he was dead. He had died on the troop carrier” Her eyes well up with tears. She raises up to her full height and affirms,“ I wouldn't be the me I am now, unless I had had these difficulties.”
 
Another stands still holding the hand  of her husband, her beloved, who sits beside her. “ He had a 48 hour leave. We  met in New Haven. Found a justice of the peace and got married.” Her face shines. 55 years disappear. She is 22 again and very much in love.  We coo.

"When the book and the bird disagree, believe the bird.  I believe them.
I should point out that it does not say, throw out the book, or throw the book at the bird.

That is heart of Unitarian Universalism.  That is our first UU principle.  Believe the bird is all about inherent worth and dignity.  Why you are a welcoming congregation. Why you supported Marriage Equality. Why I went to New Platz to marry gay men and lesbian women.

The heart of Religion – relegare, the root of religion, means to bind…connect, is relationship. Being in right relationship. Within, between and beyond. Within real self, between each other, beyond self

Who is the real you?  Ruth Fahs asked that when she was 11.  
When she was thirteen, she died. Sophia Fahs was 44.  

She wrote this after her daughter's death.  “One cannot live through such an experience without being profoundly different, ever after. We felt we had drunk from the cup of tragedy to its dregs.  From then on, no religion could inspire that did not include sorrow and tragedy..
 
For me, UU is a saving faith. UU community saves lives.  We cannot chose the amount of time we have or the time in which we live, we can only choose, how to live the times of our lives.  In light of that reality, it is worth our time, to pay attention to what gives us meaning and strength.

Each of you is here for a reason. At essence to reveal and practice that which helps you love Life. To be able ,as Wendell Berry wrote, to “Be joyous even thought you have considered all the facts. “

Of course there are times we feel like strangers, to ourselves to our life. I know you have been transitioning. You have been on the long journey called “A search process.” I know there were days you felt a little lost, but your first rate navigators kept the faith. Jerry  as chair, Joe, Tony, Doris, Carolyn, Dee, Janet. Bd. Leadership. RE leadership. Interim ministry. Judith believes you.  

You - You believe each other.  I loved meeting  RE families yesterday. You are a colorful and creative flock!  Our families are our first religious educators. Our families teach us about life, about how we feel about our really me. Do we feel at home in the world.  And when we unsettled, how do we navigate this big world.  

What about big questions. Why am I here?  Where do babies come from? Why do we die? What does love look like?  I thought I would tell you a bit about mine.  
My first love – I was five-  looked like a bird. A green parakeet. His name was Happy. We had a calico cat. Her name was Snowflake.  I guess she got her name because he landed so softly.   

One day, I heard Happy's squeek. I turned and saw the bird in the cat’s mouth. The bird was bravely pecking at cat’s nose. I squeeked.  Then we all stopped and looked at each other in surprise.  Snowflake opened her mouth. The bird flew out.  Most of him. I picked Happy up, held  him in the hollow of my little girl hands, felt his brave bird heart beating. Snowflake had his green tail feathers hanging out of her mouth.

My mother worked. She loved birds. She especially loved canaries.  It was one way she was creative. It was a way she kept her faith in her bird, in face of all the silencing forces. Some birds wait longer than others to sing.  

Each canary has his own song.  She leaned in towards the rows of hundreds of cages, watching each throat swell with the vibrations until she heard the song that called love up within her.

One winter, my mother decided we would breed canaries.  This I think was the bird part of my education into the birds and bees.  FYI  -Only Boy canaries. They sing  the songs their father sings.

The birds built their nest, laid their tiny eggs. Two hatched.  Their pink skin was so thin I could see their pulse. One  died. One lived.

Happy, the parakeet, loved baby canary. The canary loved him.  True to its bird nature, baby bird sang like his adoptive father, Happy.  He sang like a parakeet.  We never told him he wasn't behaving like the book.

When we grow if we are lucky, tragic accidents, unmanageable suffering, wait, at a distance. Sometimes the bird that dies is only.... a bird.  

When my beloved Happy died I found some tissue and a shoebox.  I put his toy with him .  I was solemn the way I had seen grownups be at a funeral. I carried the shoe box into the park to bury him under an evergreen tree. I dug a hole with a spade. A girlfriend came with me, along with her mother. We couldn’t dig it deep, so I took Happy out, held him in my hands and placed him into the earth. He felt still, small,  cool. Where did his real bird go?

I wasn’t yet churched, but my mom taught me prayers. I said one for him.  I blessed him.

I did not have a picture of any place or even an idea- just a feeling – that his bird spirit must be somewhere  -  after all this was a bird had a cat eat his tail off, was adopted by a canary and was a true friend of mine. I loved that bird.

All this stuff that is life: that lights our eyes, and fills our lungs, and moves our hearts to beat and to love- lets us laugh and makes us cry - just doesn't disappear. It must be transformed, there is no such thing as away- science tells us that!   

Anyway, I was set on sending Happy’s spirit of life onto his next adventure. After  the ritual, my girlfriend’s mother, said this to me:  

"Birds ... animals... do not have souls. They do not get prayers."

She threw the book at me. I felt stupid. Angry.

She silenced my song, Bit off my tail. What feathers I had left, went up. She belittled my intimate feelings. I believed that bird! I was aggrieved.

That prayer, any prayer, is  a way we connect to creation. Our hands become the hands of creation and we carry that sacred fluttering intangibility back home into its eternal nest in the tree of life.  

Nature’s cycle of life and death is awe full and awe some.  How is it possible?  One breath alive, the next not.  

When we gather our self, and humbly stand before the wonder of life, of reality, when we gather with love and reverence for that which we cannot see, touch, hold or measure, when we gather with love and reverence we stand on holy ground, even if it is a hard soil in an old park in the Bronx.  

No one has a right to take that away from any of us.   8 years old or 88 or any multiple there of.

I am a pretty good navigator. I found you. My dad helped me learn how to navigate life. He and I used to get ourselves lost and turn the navigating over to me.  

There were times when navigating life with my father was not so easy. My dad served in WW2, both ‘theaters” then he served at the VA.

Some of our journeys felt more like allied troop maneuvers into enemy held territory.  My mother was wrapping light fluffy desserts called Banugakku and Spanish Cream. SFYI she is Finnish and if you are Finnish anything light and fluffy is called Spanish something.  My father is honking the horn.  He is ready to roll.

Each highway interchange and bridge crossing felt like we were reclaiming occupied France. AS we approached the bridge tolls. I sat in the front seat ever vigilant for the as yet unseen enemy, TRAFFIC.

As we climbed up and over the new bridge connecting the Bronx with Long my eyes stayed peeled for the exit sign. We were entering a strange land. Queens. Miss the exit and who knows where we could end up.

As we made our final approach to uncle Wes’s  house, bought with low interest loans provided to vets through the GI bill, my father pulled to the curb and dropped us off. Perhaps like the transport plane he rode in, the one that dropped gliders behind enemy lines during the Normandy invasion.

You see dad was not going in. Years ago dad had promised that he would never set foot in that house again and he was a man of his word.

I do not know why. Dad no longer knew either, I suspect. Uncle Wes and he were interconnected on many levels. Wes was his war buddy. Wes introduced him to my mother. Wes married my mother’s sister. WW2 left its mark on both of them. Neither would risk being within reach of the other. During dessert Uncle Wes would finally vent a grievance about my father. My mom would go into the kitchen to help her sister do dishes. It was then Dad would start honking. Like a stranded goose.

I think about THE BOOK. About turning the other cheek.  

I used to think that turning the other cheek is being weak. But it being strong. Short of abuse.  

Turning the other cheek is about being strong enough to stand staying connected, even in the face of imperfect relationship- when we are hurt, disappointed, confused, angry, misunderstood.

It takes strength to stay within reach, the ability to stand being forgiving and being forgiven.

What I love about ministry is being inter connected with you, sharing, caring for, about and you.  Collaborating, consoling, comforting, confident, confidential, covenanted relationship.

You know your strength. You named it over and over. It is each of you and all of you. Individually and in community. You cherish each other. You like each other!
Dad and I stayed connected. We fought hard.  About the war. Vietnam. He hated it.  He loved the GI’s. They were his boys, his birds. No matter the color of their skin, their accents, or class.

{Did I tell you my dad was Irish Catholic.  [ approach to my boyfriends, as they climbed the stairs to the apartment- tell him to cut his hair!] Jonathan my husband of 22 years was raised Jewish. Dad loved him at first sight.  Maybe by then, hair was shorter- Jon’s was receding…Dad was delighted when we got engaged.  Maybe it was relief.  For him, I was always the bird.]

My father died in 1991. His first strokes came during the Desert Storm Victory parades.   I realize that some of my opposition to war, is because I grew up with a father whose life was haunted by war, by the stories he could not tell. I knew the lifetime impact on those who walked too long in the valley of the shadow of death. He told me once, when they dropped those gliders, those breathing white herons with human hearts not one made it to the ground whole.  When he got home, finally, he refused to fly.  

At every age, always we sit at the feet of our life and learn this  days lesson.   We wonder from time to time, often in the night,  How do I have faith, now, the way I am now? If I can’t, who will. Who will love me now?  Have faith in me, now?

For all the BOOK told my father about his life, sometimes, as he aged, my father could believe the bird.  If not in himself, in his grandchildren.

At his last birthday we sat around his bed, now in the dining room, mom made Spanish Cream. WE sang old Irish songs, the ones he sang to my babies.

Up out of his big barreled now bony birdlike chest he made me promise, “Promise me, that you will not let your sons become cannon fodder in the wars of old men.”

Dad was a tough old bird. In our final conversations, I asked him what he wanted me to be for him, if he couldn't tell off the nurses himself.  "If the Lord wants to take me, let me go."   I wrote those words into his living will.     When he went into the Hospital, I navigated his journey with protocols, nurses and doctors.  When Dad was too helpless to stay out of reach, Uncle Wes, legs weak from the diabetes that eventually claimed both of them, crossed back over a tarnished bridge, and with his walker hobbled into the hospital to say goodbye.

Two old soldiers. Two  tough old birds, surrendering at last to what they must become, to what becomes of each of us.  

I read this recently in a book called Gilead. “ It is useful to live long enough to outlive one’s grievances.”

The decision “do not resuscitate “was an act of love. I lifted him up, with a daughter’ solemn loving hands, into the safety of eternity’s evergreen tree.
 
After dad died, Daniel, aged 31/2, asked me where Grandpa went.  It was a teachable moment, as we say. I told him that grandpa's spirit went to God, and his body, was now an empty shell that he left behind, went to be recycled in the earth.  I can still picture my little boy bent over the grave looking down into the darkness, trying to see how the recycling of grandpa was going.

When would grandpa become a tree, a safe shady place for a baby bird to nest?
This is the tree of service and faith that I have been planting in myself and believe me, it's for the birds: baby birds, birds with broken branches, song birds, love birds, baby birds, big birds, tough and tender old birds.  

I spoke to my mother This morning. She is 92.  She has alzheimers. I told her I was preaching a candidate sermon.   

She told me, “Have faith in yourself.”   Said that I should pass that onto you. So listen to the grandma. She knows her birds.  “Have faith in yourself.”  

Have faith in yourself.  

Believe you me.

Believe the bird.


Copyright  2006, Barbara Fast.



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