I know it will seem a bit odd, like a guy dressed in jeans, Pendleton wool shirt and a Stetson hat listening to Mozart. But I can’t help it; my favourite spring pastimes are bird watching and bear hunting. I guess you could call me oxymoronic, a word I concocted to describe myself as a character of contradictions. But to me, bear hunting and bird watching are completely compatible. I always do them together. And so early one May morning, I found myself sleuthing around the edge of one of my favourite meadows, bird-watching binoculars slung around my neck and bear-hunting cannon slung over my shoulder.
The sun was just coming up. The forest edge was alive with the sound of music—song sparrows, robins, red-winged black birds, meadowlarks, and a choir of others. Everyone was having a go at a mad cacophony that only an aged Beethoven and I would call music. With each new note my binoculars would come off my chest and I would slowly turn in the direction of the voice to spy on the feathered soloist.
The trick in this is to remain inconspicuous. Neither bear nor bird will hang around much if you clump through the bush. Moccasin-clad feet and tree-flitting stealth are the order of the day. I try to stay out of sight and silent, keeping the wind in my face so that even the olfactory sense will not be fouled with my presence.
On this particular morning, everything was going along just dandy. The birds were singing like nobody was listening, and far in the end of the meadow a black bear was dancing like nobody was watching. And then I was spotted.
Far across the meadow, at the forest edge about a half-mile from me, a pair of birds that looked like reconfigured ostriches were ogling me. They were actually sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis). These guys are at once the FBI and the Friendly Giants of the bird world. Besides having the oldest fossil record of any living bird (conservatively 2.5 million years) and a lifespan older than most birds (up to 25 years), wisdom is actually not their long suit—size and eyes are. They look like small horses when they’re standing out in a meadow, a fact that may explain why ornithologists call sandhill crane chicks “colts.” Wingspan can be almost eight feet and though I have never measured one for standing height, they can go up to four feet high. With their long, stick-like legs, height seems to be about half again more than length. The pair that spotted me were particularly large, standing a good six feet tall. As soon as they got a bead on me flitting from tree to tree, they began their earsplitting cry. The bird books say it is like a ringing trumpeting sound: garoo-oo-oo-oo, garoo-oo-oo-oo, tuk, tuk-tuk, tuk, tuk, tuk, onk. To me, it sounds something like the mad wail of a peacock combined with the frantic mating call of a wild turkey on steroids.
As soon as this pair of sandhill cranes started to trumpet, they began to stomp towards me. There was a definite threat in their gait and God knows they had the size to hang a licking on me. So I stepped out from behind my tree, stood out in the open meadow and trudged back to my pickup, not because I couldn’t defend myself with my bear cannon slung over my shoulder, but because experience has taught me that once a pair of sandhill cranes have me spotted, I am seriously busted. They won’t shut up or stop following me around till I leave. I once had a trumpeting pair follow me for the better part of a whole morning. With all of their persistent tracking and howling, every bird and bear in the country knew exactly where I was, all of the time.
These town criers of forest and meadow are extremely effective as protective agents, not because they are large enough to stand tall, nor because they have keen eyes to see, nor a voice that is so powerfully effective. They have all of these attributes but their effectiveness is because they actually stand tall and say something. During my bush forays, all kinds of other large birds see me and silently fly off. In fact, a large great horned owl had spotted me that very morning and flew off so silently that I would not have known he was there except that he did it right in front of my eyes. The owl didn’t say a thing nor did it rustle a branch—it simply and quietly took care of itself. And in that, in some odd way, he reminded me of me.
What is it that makes me so quiet and individualistic when it comes to living out my faith in my culture? Would that I could be more like those prophetic sandhill cranes. My faith in Christ gives me eyes to see, ears to hear, and a voice to cry out with in a culture that desperately needs prophetic warning, but I prefer to silently fly off. My faith in and following of Jesus has given me much to say in terms of ethics, morals, politics, and societal norms, yet I prefer to go about incognito as a Christian in my culture. There is much to cry out about prophetically, both in terms of warning and encouragement, to pluck up and to plant in a Jeremiah-like way. But honestly, I prefer to make my faith a private matter, muttering under my breath some mantra about the separation of church and state, happy to confuse tolerance for love.
And yet the one whom I follow and call Lord lived so prophetically and publicly that everything he had to say he said in public (John 18:21). What he had to say by way of prophetic teaching, commentary, and warning caused three levels of government that otherwise hated each other to conspire together to put him to death. And he died so prophetically and publicly that friends cried at the foot of his cross at the same time as foes wagged their heads at him and spat on him.
I think my silence has often been fuelled by a confusion between love and tolerance. Tolerance is so easy, so benign, not at all infectious. I think too that my silence has often come out of my preference for spirituality as opposed to social responsibility and action. Spirituality is so personal, so private, so individualistic, not at all the stuff of community, or at least it seems to be. But really, the question for me is, do I love the people with whom I share culture enough to be intolerant of teachings, practices, and political directions that go against what Christ teaches, and to stand tall and loud against them because they are harmful and hurtful and wrong? The question is, do I love enough to be prophetic in my culture? The question is, can there be a spirituality that is truly Christian and Christ-like that does not take culture and social action within that culture seriously?
In a recent book titled The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by Geffrey B. Kelly, F. Burton Nelson, and Renate Bethge, the point is made that: “… Jesus comes into people’s lives in a way that ‘must provoke contradiction and hostility.’” They go on to quote from Bonhoeffer’s Christology lectures: “Jesus comes to us incognito, as a beggar among beggars, as an outcast among the outcast, as despairing among the despairing, as dying among the dying.” The solidarity in this kind of Christ-like way of being debunks my comfortable confusion between love and tolerance. It removes any possibility of silently tolerating anything that would invade society to take away from life. And most certainly it moves me to imitate in my society the Forest Crier in its meadow.
