“What on earth was that?” said my son Halden. He had his head sucked into his shirt collar like a turtle.
“I am not sure,” I said. I was in the act of desperately trying to collect my thoughts along with a spilled glass of shiraz and a particularly good bit of sharp cheese that was scattered all over the deck. I carefully raised my head to peer over the railing of the sundeck just in time to watch the author of our dive-bombing pull off an unbelievable aerobatic manoeuvre. He veered right and then left before bashing a wee sparrow to the ground. Instantly swooping up, down, and around in helicopter-like fashion, he grabbed the stunned sparrow with his talons and proceeded to wherever he was holding his dinner party. We had just been had by the grim reaper of the bird feeder.
Moments before, the five of us were all sitting together enjoying our usual Friday family time before dinner. For the first time since winter, we were on the sundeck overlooking the lake and enjoying a spring evening that was at least a month late. Because spring was so late, our two bird feeders on the deck were still providing full fly-in food service to hundreds of starving little dickey birds. They fluttered all around us, sometimes even landing on an arm of an Adirondack chair. It was a twittering happy moment. And then suddenly there had been a savage swirling swoosh from above the house that went right through the blissful basking bunch of birdies and us, scattering everyone in alliteration. It was an American kestrel (a.k.a. sparrow hawk or falco sparverius).
After the little raptor finished his business, we bid him farewell with the appropriate threats and hand signals. And then we all seemed to fall silent. Our usual festive Friday happy time had somehow turned into a silent wake. We all seemed to turn our thoughts inward, partly in reflection and partly out of respect for the little sparrow, who had just been converted from dinner guest to dinner.
Life is like that: so solid and so fragile, so joyous and so heartbreaking, so full of life and so full of death. One moment life is an elated and celebratory dinner party on a deck or in some upper room, and the next moment it's a cross. The human condition seems to be just one sparrow hawk away from suffering and calamity. But for me at least, there is something really odd in all of this.
The odd thing is that the worst of times can become the best of times. The odd thing is that since coming to faith in Christ, in my experiences in life, often I have never felt more alive than when the kestrel knocks me on my keister. Many times, more often than I care to admit, those hard times somehow sensitize me to experience life to the fullest. They somehow remove the background noise of life and make each note crystal clear. They somehow inspire me to let go of my chokehold on life to live more freely and courageously. They somehow motivate me to live more fully in the moment. They somehow move me from my natural tendency to be “a human doing” to becoming “a human being.” And beyond all of this, or perhaps because of it all, God seems more real and close and dear and experienced. I don't understand why this is so, I only experience it to be so. It never makes me desire hard times or to seek them out, but at the same time, like the psalmist, I am oddly thankful for them at some deep level: see Psalm 119:71.
For me, the catalyst for this experience of discovering deep value in human suffering is my Easter faith in Christ of the cross. Before faith in Christ, my response to the sparrow hawk experiences in life was usually fear and flight, something quite different from what I have just described. And I think the reason now that my faith in Christ and his cross makes all the difference is not a false sense of victory in suffering, but rather a full sense of community in suffering. The cross somehow places Christ and his people of the cross right in the middle of my experience of hard times. The cross somehow places my hand in the nail-scarred hand of an Almighty Creator God and in the fleshy palms of his people of faith. And like my ancestors three millennia past, those people of God who discovered him to be especially present in their community while doing hard time in the wilderness, I discover God, with all of his creative power, doing hard time with me and we. This brings infinite possibility to what the creator-potter God can fashion out of the clay of my human suffering. This brings deep meaning to Jesus of the cross and his words about sparrows, my value to God and the possibility of life without fear (Matthew 10:26-32).
