In the woods surrounding my brother’s eight-story apartment building, I heard some birds that seemed to be interacting with each other. From an unknown distance, one of the birds called, and after a few seconds, closer to where I was, the other bird responded. I spent some quiet moments listening to this avian call-and-response and found a measure of peace.
I spent a lot of time in various churches when I was growing up, my mother dressing her three children in our best clothes for attendance at some Sunday gathering. For me, the lessons never took, but long after I had left, my mother would make a call from her home (and my hometown) in Pittsburgh to whatever city I was currently living in and ask me if I had found my “church home.” When told that I had not, she would encourage me to “join the choir,” knowing that I love to sing, and counting on the power of the church to draw me into its rhythms and routines. I saw through her ploys, though, and stayed outside of the commitments to a church, though I am comfortable in the buildings and among the rituals.
When I was an advertising art director for the L.S. Ayres department store, one of my duties was to organize and direct photo shoots in New York City. My first bride suggested that when I was in New York, she would spend time elsewhere so that I could stay with our 14-year-old daughter in their house in Morristown, New Jersey. I stayed over the weekend one time and was charged with making sure that Lisa got to church on Sunday morning. Lisa was never one for timeliness, and by the time I’d convinced her to get up, fed and dressed, she decided that we would be late for church, and that it would be embarrassing to walk in at that time. An important ritual for her mother and for her was being forgone, so I took her to the woods below her house.
“See that sky? You’re in church,” I told Lisa as she sat on the grass in her Sunday dress. “See those trees? Hear those birds? You’re in church,” I continued. I gave no “sermon in the hollow,” but I kept pointing out the beauty of the world she stood in and telling her, “You’re in church.” We stayed in the woods for a period of time that I determined would have equaled a church service. Walking up the hill toward her home, I hoped that I had conveyed a lesson about care and communion with our environment, and the multiplicity of religious thinking.
Walking along Douglas Drive toward my brother’s apartment building, I hear in the woods that line both sides of the street the “tweets,” and “cheer cheers,” the cries of various birds, only some of which I can identify. Though I cannot see it, I hear an American Goldfinch trilling its multi-syllabic song; a Northern Mockingbird screams a sharp call from the top of a tree, and from the deep brush on the south side of the street, I hear the keen “mew” of a Gray Catbird. In the late evening, as I worry and wait and wonder about the next step for my brother after he recovers from his cancer surgery, I sit alone at his dining table in front of a window and listen to the birds, the “cheep-and-chuckle” of Robins, a sound overlaid by the “chip-chip” of Cardinals, and know that my mother would be pleased that I had at least, attended a bird church.
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