A Birder’s Prayer On Rising Early to Bird
Benozzo Gozzoli, Stories of St. Francis,
detail of St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, 1452,
Fresco, Perugia, Italy
Give me the humility to know
This day will be blessed, Lord,
Because you have given my heart
The power to love Your humble creatures, the birds,
Who delight and benefit us in five ways —
With their songs, their colors, their joyous flight,
Their flesh and their feathers,
That also warm our bodies.
Strengthen my heart, Lord,
To see amidst Your wonderful creation, the birds,
The forests that shelter them, the insects that feed them,
The waters that support them,
And the sun that gives their eyes light to see.
And slow my pace to admire Your wonderful creation,
The flowers, whose beauty adorns nature’s body like jewels.
And let my heart know that
This birdtrip will be a good one, Lord,
Because You have given my limbs power
To rise from sleep and enter
Your world of infinite beauty and mystery --
And that today You have again given my eyes
The power to see Thy creatures,
The birds.
Amen.
I think you could appreciate the above little poem even without a commentary or additional information. However, I’ve found if I like a piece of writing, it often runs through my mind for some time, and I wonder about its genesis -- not to say etiology. How and why was it born into the mind of its creator? What were the birth pangs? What were the associations? Especially for poetry we think of these things, since if it is good, it is allusive. We are often at a loss to know what the poet means. Think of Coleridge’s Xanadu. Who could have imagined something like this? I love to connect the personal and the poetical in a piece of writing; they’re usually fascinating. For those of a similar cast of mind, I have provided the information below. It provides some interesting information about the process of how this prayer came to see the light. (On the other hand, there is the school of thought that knowing too much can curtail one’s imagination regarding interpretation. If you are one of these, stop now.)
The writing above is a prayer in the form of a poem (or vice versa -- is every prayer a poem? I guess you need divine inspiration to be able to tell.) In any case, it does not look like, and certainly is not, an essay. Given that birds are one of the main themes, however, I thought it might be appropriate here. And despite its short length, the thoughts and feelings that went into it were complex. It took only a few days to write the basic ideas, but years to fiddle with and edit. If truth be told, I could write a book about the many contributory thoughts, feelings and associations that went into it. God alone is a big subject. Subsidiary characters in my spiritual development, like Socrates, Zen, Bertrand Russell, Beethoven and Thoreau – not to mention my great love of nature – would take up quite a few pages. (That’s why people write poems, I guess – so they don’t have to write long and perhaps tedious books.) Be all this as it may, a few comments here must suffice to explain the main ideas and sources of its origin.
I originally wrote it in 1994 or ’95. It was late at night and my wife had gone to bed with the children. I stayed up at the kitchen table to write down some thoughts that had come to me while I took care of the kids that day. The first stanza had been floating in and out of my head the whole time. I can’t remember now exactly what initiated my train of thought, but I had been repeating it all day, like a mantra. It was short enough to remember, and as it came into my mind, time after time, I repeated it. I thought that was the end of it – a few lines, curious and even amusing. They were about my favorite subject, and addressed to the Deity (of all people!). But a prayer? This was pretty much a first for me.
Of course, I have lines running through my head all the time, day and night -- sometimes I write them down, sometimes I don’t. I try not to pre-judge them; you never know where they will go. They could lead anywhere. But this stanza was strange, even for me. More lines came to me later that evening or soon after. When the “raptus” ended, I found that I had five paragraphs or stanzas, some very simple and pious, but some sarcastic and poking fun at the many quirks of birders. The sarcastic lines had the best imagery!
Strangely, the stanzas had evolved in the form of a ‘prayer.’ I do not write many poems (very few), much less prayers. Further, I do not believe in any form of religion that requires a “Lord.” This was (and is) the central contradiction of the poem: a prayer? In my youth I was militantly anti-clerical, although middle age softened the edges quite a bit. Several decades of experience had given me new insights. So, amused and perplexed, I surveyed the results. After a lot of reflection, it seemed to make sense: the feelings were about birds and nature, both of which I greatly love. It was, further, directed to a great ‘spirit’ that I had (and have) no name for, but now feel the presence of strongly. It was also quite sincere, being a call to this spirit for guidance in finding greater humility in my search for birds. That is, to better see “His” world (in its totality), not just the world of my own making, the world of my own desires.
I knew further that the prayer was written in the spirit of a poem called The Canticle of the Sun, by the great medieval mystic and saint Francis of Assisi. I had little conscious sense of copying the style of the prayer, but I know it influenced me. As a result, my poem uses mostly ‘artless’ language and uses a somewhat antiquated form of speech. This is all in the spirit of the translation of St. Francis’ poem. (I feel any address to the Almighty should be simple and direct, but ultimately, how does one speak to God?) In the end, I thought that if all forms of language are inadequate, then “artlessness” seemed best. Especially because any Deity must know even better than I what I felt and wanted to say. One could not impress “Him” with fine elocution -- it was pointless. But my preferred literary speech is just the opposite, anything but simple -- it tends to be analytical, irreverent, ironic, hyperbolic. John Donne mixed with Mort Sahl. Perhaps this is why the thoughts and language seemed so delightful – for me, a welcome change from hyper-consciousness and irony.
Another factor in the writing of the prayer was/is my friendship with Fr. Benedict Groeschel. Fr. Benedict is a Franciscan monk from the New York City area who is a dear friend of mine. During my adolescence I was privileged to become acquainted with him. Although I was not and never have been a catholic (and find almost any institutional religion difficult to understand or accept), I developed a great affection for his unique personality, spirituality, wit and intelligence. I had no prior experience of priests or monks, so he made quite an impression on me. Further, I think seeing him and his brown habit gave me a greater ‘sense’ of the life of St. Francis. At one point, he gave me a copy of a biography of St. Francis, and this is where I saw the text of the Canticle of the Sun. I was taken by the simplicity and humility of the prayer. It gives thanks to the Deity for the common things that make our world possible: the sun, moon, water and fire. Reflect on it for a minute: where have you ever seen a poem that gives thanks for all the things we take for granted every day? The air? The sun? Water? The startling originality of it takes your breath away. To me there are no two ways about it: it is an invocation of the divine. It is the prayer we should all have in our hearts every day, but are so taken in by the world and its ways we do not. I stored it away in my mind as a wonderful evocation of our relation to the world and its creator.
I should also add that in 1981, during the course of my work to create the Parks Alliance in New York, I met a man who was operations manager of the Cloisters Museum (a very simpatico guy, but his name escapes me now). In the course of a rambling conversation (I was responsible for the rambling, I’m afraid), he happened to mention Lynn White’s article The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. Among other things, this brilliant article proposed St. Francis as the patron saint of the environmental movement; I read it and it made a great impression on me. It dawned on me that St. Francis’ vision is universal, like Buddha’s. We need to re-discover the vision of man and creation that he had. Without it, there is no solution to the presence of man on earth. In terms of humans remaining on earth, it is Thoreau on the one hand, St. Francis on the other. One for the things we must change, the other for those we cannot. Over the years I developed a great respect and affection for Francis, much as I had for Fr. Benedict.
Given all the above—and my own spiritual history and love of writing and birds—it is little wonder (despite the contradictions) that the ideas of the prayer would find their way into my mind and on paper in some form. But it was in limbo for many years, unfinished.
Occasionally I would think of the prayer, or find it buried in my papers, and would try to put the final touches on it. I never could. In recent months, however, I have looked at it again, and had an insight. I concluded that all it needed was not new or different, but fewer words. Strangely, eliminating three stanzas made it a more perfect expression of my feelings. The eliminated stanzas had ideas and imagery that were hard to give up, but in the final analysis they were not really what I wanted to say. (If you want real writer’s block, try writing a prayer.) By eliminating the ironic lines, the poem became acceptable to me. I reasoned that one cannot address the Deity with irony. One could, of course, but it wouldn’t be a prayer. The way it is written now I can actually say it before I leave in the morning. The stricken stanzas may be a separate, more light-hearted, poem.
Several comments on the text itself: what do you think I mean by “(feathers) that also warm our bodies?” A few moments of thought should reveal it. And of course there are more than five ways birds benefit us. Another point: the title is simple-minded, but I couldn’t think of anything better. Lastly, in the third stanza I mention my appreciation for the quality of sight itself. This is the greatest miracle of all to my mind – the very process of seeing, not what is seen! (Of course in the end it is all part of one continuum.) Nothing we can see can equal sight itself. Somehow evolution has produced a biological system that can give an accurate ‘picture’ of reality and a mind to read the signals and interpret them. This is, to me, incredible. It is so seldom remarked on, yet is the greatest wonder of all.
In any case, the above is a short history of the prayer. Given its unusual subject, I thought these comments might be helpful to the reader. They are also much longer than the poem, if so it is. 117 lines to elucidate 23. Such is prose, or the world according to prose. One thing I have not cured myself of is a desire to explicate the inexplicable.
