September's Musings: Birds, Icons, and Creedal Christrianity

Rector’s Rambling: September 2010

Freckles and Monet, the parakeets, are chattering pleasantly in the dining room as I write today. As I walked back from the car to the house a few minutes ago, I could hear the Speckled Sussex hens clucking amicably as the rooster, a rather nasty and self-important brute, crowed triumphantly in the distance. Earlier in the day, my pheasants were as agitated as the quail were quiet in their respective pens. There is no accounting for avian personalities or proclivities. But I do love having the birds around. There is a sense of rightness about being surrounded by the mesmerizing sounds and the seemingly synchronized beat of wings as a flock of birds moves together, apparently leaderless, but as if on cue. After a long and hot summer of waiting, the chickens are starting to lay. The eggs are small, pullet eggs, but as the hens mature, the size of the eggs will increase. Nothing in the store can quite match the color or taste of fresh free range eggs from happy girls. Surely God has blessed me and surrounded me with things that I love.
Often, I see Briarwood, our home, as a sort of Icon. At its best, it gives me a glimpse of what heaven just might be like. Sometimes, it also reminds me of our parish home a St. John’s. Filled with all kinds of birds, beautiful, somewhat unpredictable and certainly uncontrollable, it is a place where I so often experience God in our midst. It often leaves me with a rather rushed sense of being completely out of control, but it also teaches me that God is always in control, and that through circumstances and senescent beings that always seem to surprise me, God is working out his purposes not only in the world, but in each of our lives.
Of late, I’ve been trying to read a bit more serious theology. Bishop Nazir-Ali of Rochester, Archbishop Williams of Canterbury, John Calvin, and of course the Church Fathers. But I am still recalled to the standards which have impacted my life for so long: Anthony Trollope’s “The Warden”, assorted poetry of the English Romantics, and Spencer’s Faerie Queen are always high on my list for browsing. I find great comfort in the company of ideas new and old, and it is a wonderful feeling to discuss with my wife and children how those ideas fit together. I believe with those who have gone before me that God is unavoidable in and around every idea, the good ones and the bad ones, because he employs them to ultimately draw us to himself. As we exercise the reason with which He has endowed us, we come to see His fingerprints on all of human experience. That is I suppose why radicalism and extremism is so dangerous. The higher our emotions run, it seems the less likely we are to see God all around us. Certainly emotions are a good thing which help us to know love and to perceive God with us, but when they run unchecked, they lead us to fearful expressions of ego and thoughtlessness which consume us and all we have built over the centuries.
It interests me that those on the left generally blame those on the right of unthinking extremism, and those on the right generally return the charge against those on the left. What a shame it is that both are so often right! In our attempts to control and manipulate each other into some imagined ideal conformity, we tend to become hateful and absolute…and not very pleasant to be around. Oh how I wish I could go back and tame the intemperateness of my youth. A bout with melanoma and encroaching years really have made a difference in my outlook and my faith.
The end of the matter is however so very simple. I am to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and my neighbor as myself. I suppose a corollary would be that I ought to acknowledge my own inability to consistently get things right, and put my trust in Jesus Christ, the Incarnate God, who came to make amends for all my shortcomings and to offer me fullness and peace in this world and the next. Another might be that I really ought not to think too much of myself, and that my ultimate holiness is more or less dependent on modeling among family and friends the kind of relationships that God models for us all in His character as Trinity in Unity.
This “Rector’s Ramble has been pretty rambly today, but it is too hot to do anything else, and so like my friends Freckles and Monet, I have chosen to chirp away in joy and hopefully with some sense of God’s harmony.
Sincerely,
Bill+