A Birdwatcher's Guide to the Spiritual Life

Several years ago, I made a directed retreat at a quaint retreat house owned by the Diocese of Green Bay situated on a nearly uninhabited island in the middle of the bay that gives Green Bay its name. On my first session with my director, I identified myself as a bird-watcher. To my surprise and delight she handed me a book on prayer by an Orthodox Bishop, Anthony Bloom, in which he devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between watching birds and prayer. I don?t recall the name of the book or what he specifically said about the relationship, but, I have not seen that connection made by anyone again. Since the relationship is so close and so illuminating, it seems a shame not to take it even further than did the good Bishop. I?ve been a bird watcher, with some of the intensity of a golfer, for over 30 years, and have been engaged in spiritual life ministry as a retreat presenter and spiritual director for most of those years, so the task seems somewhat appropriately to be mine.

My experience is that as birds are the object of attention to birdwatchers, so God is the object of attention of the spiritual life, especially when we are at prayer. And ?attention? is the key word here. The modern spiritual writer, Simone Weil, who waited so long - too long - in the narthex of the Catholic church, dying before she could cross the threshold into its sanctuary, made ?paying attention to God?, and ?waiting for God? the heart of the spiritual journey. Indeed her most widely read work is a collection of essays entitled, ?Waiting for God?. Waiting ? it?s what bird-watchers do.

Bird watchers are an egalitarian group, hardly elitist. I have been bird watching with a professor at the University of Chicago and with an uneducated construction worker (and the blue collar guy was a better bird-watcher than the University professor). There are surprisingly a good number of priests who engage in this activity. Indeed, one of the premier birders in the whole of the USA is a pastor in the bird-rich lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. One of the most passionate birders I?ve known is an inner city pastor in Queens. Bird watching is a simple activity ? no special ?uniforms? are required; the only necessary equipment is a decent pair of binoculars (under $100 will usually suffice), and a portable field guide that you can conveniently carry in your back pocket. Although most birding is done out of doors, you can do surprisingly well from your deck or living room window, especially if you put out bird feed. So, it is quite easy to believe the assertion made that more Americans engage in bird watching than in any other outdoor activity or sport. With some provisos that I will mention at the end of these reflections, I want to suggest that bird watching is fundamentally a contemplative activity. Let me draw some parallels.

First, like God and Grace, birds are everywhere. People often tell me, when they learn of my interest, that I should come to their town or their backyard because the birding is so good there. This suggests that birds prefer such lovely spots as seasides, woods, and wild rivers, and that the more unattractive areas of the planet are therefore without birds. Well, most birds are selective about where they live. But, there are no habitats without birds. Even the ugliest and litter strewn urban lots and untended parks have their birds. In the city it may be mostly house sparrows, starlings, and rock doves (the ornithologically correct name for the common pigeon), but I am always impressed by the number of cheery robins I find contentedly grazing an empty lot in the inner city. Though I say to myself of them:?Don?t you have better taste than this?? It seems to meet needs, so that they are apparently indifferent to ambiance. Many people are surprised to find out that one of America?s most dramatic and endangered species, the stunning peregrine falcon (dives at 200 mph), is now thriving nicely on the concrete cliffs of Chicago?s tall buildings.

Several years ago I was eager for a sighting of the colorful yellow-headed blackbird, a bird mostly of the high plains of the American West, but occasionally seen in the Chicago area. One summer, it was 1981, I criss-crossed by car ? twice - the Great Plains on the watch for my first sighting. I went to all the right places, at all the right times, but never spotted one. Later that fall, I was bird watching with a friend in the Lake Calumet marsh area southeast of the city, a ragged place mostly torn up by industrial development. We drove past a dirt driveway leading into a dump, a road used mostly by pounding and banging garbage trucks. We saw some birds right in the middle of the driveway, and so we stopped. Someone had thrown some shelled corn down into the dirt, and there, in that miserable dump, I saw my first yellow-headed blackbird.

Just as a birds will show up everywhere, so the experience of God may be expected at anytime and anyplace. The experience of bird watchers may help all of us appreciate more deeply the divine indifference to place when it comes to visitations by God. Churches aren?t the only sacred places; rosaries and prayer books may sometimes be replaced by binoculars.

But, what true bird-watchers learn very quickly is that you have to approach birds on their terms, not yours. Birds are indifferent to us, except as annoying, even frightening objects. And so the slightest suggestion that you might be a harmful to them sends them winging quickly away. This means that you must be quiet ? no one takes dogs bird-watching or even small children, certainly no boom boxes. And bird-watchers converse quietly in the field. Some bird-watchers imitate the song of certain birds, even play recordings of their songs, in order to lure them into view. But even here you have to be careful. If the sound you make, however accurate, is too loud, the bird will flee in terror. It?s as though a three ounce goldfinch heard the call of a 500 pound goldfinch. You also have to move slowly. There is a lot of standing around when you are bird watching, a lot of waiting. You even have to be careful about your binoculars. If you see a bird up in a tree and quickly pull up your binoculars for a better look, this simple jerky movement may startle the bird and send it winging away to a less visible perch. If you are birding by car, the birds may not be frightened of the cars, which they see frequently, but if you throw open the door and jump out for a better look, you will probably drive the bird to cover and safety. And of course, if you are looking for a particular bird, you have to go to its habitat, not expect it to come to yours.

All of this is practical advice for getting the best look at birds, but it also reflects a reverence and respect for them. The out of doors is not after all a zoo or circus where animals are expected to perform for us. It is their home, their space. And we can only enter it carefully on bended knee. This also describes our search for God. We go on God?s terms. God will not honor our efforts if we do not honor a world that is indeed his ?habitat?. So, prayer requires us to be quiet, to be prepared for disappointment when we don?t feel his presence, and not to reject him when he isn?t present as we would like. God, like the birds, is not there in the woods, or in the church or in our prayers, to entertain us. We are there, as we respect the birds, to honor him.

Which leads us to the eagerly sought fruit of prayer ? contemplation. We want to see God, and we would prefer long exposures of his presence. We are told that in heaven we will gaze forever, inexhaustively, on the beauty of God, and we expect that this is the way it happens here on earth. We are after all presented in much of our religious literature and statuary with saints who seem wrapped in ecstatic, even orgasmic awareness of the divine presence. But this doesn?t happen to us, and so we are disappointed.