The Tender Birds, page 3
At the beginning of his stay, he’d received a get-well note from Alison, handwritten on stationery with a picture of a robin, its nest and eggs. “Dear Father Matt,” she wrote. “I hope you are feeling better and that you will take as long as you need to get well.
“…As for me, I have been writing about my early life, allowing forgiveness some room to breathe.”
She added that Daisy was doing well.
Matt emailed her, thanking her for her kindness. He had many such greetings from parishioners and friends, all of which he acknowledged with a simple sentence or two. It was a practised art, this type of response, couched in neutral language and signed with a blessing, one which, as a young priest, he’d learned from his superiors. He’d known by instinct that a priest must be judicious in his choice of words. He could not afford to have entanglements.
“How about just friends?” said Natalie, when he taught for a term in Toronto.
“I consider you my friends,” he had replied, but he had meant it more for her husband Elias than for her. The pair were scholars, but Natalie was a wit as well, always laughing and talking, an uneasy eddy of anything-can-happen pooling around her.
Alison felt more like a daughter than a friend. He preferred that.
Perhaps he had no friends.
Matt also hoped to write. He’d withdrawn from texting, blogging, and tweeting as if he were peeling off layers of excess clothing, useless in the salt air, the scouring heat of summer. He wanted the world to forget about his former life.
Yet he didn’t want to die. He knew what it might feel like to vanish.
What he wanted was to be bodiless. Pure mind.
At times, he could feel his decimation, cell by cell, as if he were starry matter in thrall to a powerful and massive darkness, a meticulous tugging and pulling apart of his self, gravity absorbing him, star by star. He let go of himself, gave into it, imagined his flesh as a kind of reverse Eucharist, consumed and eaten by the body of God.
Now, at night he would step outside on the rectory’s deck, gazing upward at the glittering sky. He’d pray for the grace of dissolution. With joy, he’d feel himself about to disappear.
Perhaps he wanted to die, after all.
He would hear Alison’s voice, a poem she wrote.
In the lifting of wings, wonder and sorrow both.
What flies, flies away from you.
By a Hidden Name
SHOREHAVEN, MASS., JUNE 2, 2011
I first encountered Alison two years ago at a weekday Mass, shortly after I’d agreed to help out at St. Bart’s. A stately young woman, she was as calm as early morning. She walked up the aisle, eyes straight ahead, purposeful, as if she’d come to meet someone, and then she took her seat. Throughout the Mass, she wore the same, intent look. From my vantage point on the altar, she never appeared distracted, as most people do at some point during the liturgy, a few of them dozing during the Eucharistic prayers (which, I have to admit, are both meandering and soporific). When she came up to receive Communion, I had the feeling that she was carrying something or someone. Had she lost a child, I wondered. Yet she did not appear either burdened or bereaved. It was as if she were dressed in solitude, a garment that fitted her well. She bore whatever it was with grace.
That evening, I turned on the local cable news station, watching with some amusement and frustration as the screen filled up with a jerky video sent in from someone’s smart phone. Citizen journalists, newscasters called them, meaning they didn’t get paid, a cheap way to fill in airtime. Then, all at once the sky went wild before my eyes.
A fledgling falcon, leaving its nest on the roof of the Hancock Tower, its cloudlike reflections in blue glass, ideal for a young bird born for the sky, born to an instinct for immense speed and swift attack, yet unskilled in the symmetry of stealth flight; soaring, diving, unable to right itself from an impossible turn toward the Mass Pike to the south, spinning and crashing into a truck, bouncing off to the side of the road where an off-duty cop pulled over, saw the creature, put in a call to The Animal Rescue League, took out emergency gear in the trunk, and sped to the South Boston shelter.
The anchor’s voice-over described the scene as the cop delivered the injured bird; then they cut away to the shelter’s operating room. There was a vet in O.R. scrubs; working with her was a familiar soul with thick braided hair and contemplative gaze, the name tag “Alison” pinned to her blue smock. She was showing X-rays to her boss, who turned to the camera and spoke. “Looks like a broken femur and fractured humerus,” the vet said. “A juvenile peregrine falcon. Likely her first time up in the air. Maybe her last.”
Alison was prepping her for surgery. She touched the injured falcon, held it down, felt for its heartbeat through its thick cape of feathers, listened with the stethoscope, covered the bird’s face with a mask and began to administer anaesthesia. Then I realized that she must have felt everything at once: the falcon’s warmth, its fierce, unnameable strength, the poor creature’s terror, not knowing what had happened, where it was.
Before it fell unconscious, the eyes of the peregrine falcon opened wide, and I felt certain that I saw what followed (I am, after all, a psychologist, a priest; surely I’d earned the right to intuition); that gazing into their wild innocence, Alison forgot herself, emptied her soul into the healing of its body, placed her hands upon its broken wing and prayed.
The Sunday following that television show, Matt had stood by the church door, greeting parishioners. He said hello to Alison. “I saw you on TV,” he told her, then asked her how the falcon was.
“She’ll never be able to hunt in the wild,” she’d said. “Her wings don’t have proper symmetry.”
Matt hadn’t been sure what to say.
“If she’s too much trouble, she’ll be put down. I hope not.”
“I’ll pray for her,” he said. “Does she have a name?”
“Daisy.” Alison paused. “If she were banded, she’d have a code name.”
“Daisy, the peregrine falcon.” He frowned. He had tried to imagine adding the name to the chain of intentions he’d offer before Communion.
Remember, Lord, your people, especially those for whom we now pray, he’d thought.
For Daisy, the peregrine falcon.
Feathered fighter-jet. Natural-born killer.
Alison seemed to sense his disquiet. “By a hidden name, she is known to God,” she’d said. “Don’t worry about her name.”
He had assured her that he’d keep both her and Daisy in his prayers.
She thanked him and left.
Although he enjoyed birds, he’d never before prayed for one.
No one has to know what you pray for. Only God.
Matt recalled how Alison had looked in the video, her hand on the injured creature, feeling its warmth, its heartbeat, its utter strangeness.
Alison had been a regular Mass-goer, he wrote, almost a daily communicant. You don’t see that kind of thing in young people anymore. Given all the sex scandals in the Boston diocese, that’s not surprising. And Alison’s devotion made me feel somehow fraudulent, as if she were doing the Church an honour it didn’t deserve. Yet she also made me realize that God had plucked each of us out of the muck of human trouble, had set us down, weeds and flowers alike in a giant vase, roses with dandelions and milkweed, each beholden to its own beauty and calling, and none of it about human ego, all of it a mystery. Her daily presence had been just that: ineffable, a gift unearned. Yet beneath the surface, I could sense an undertow, something not quite right with her.
Some weeks later, Alison had sent him an email to which she’d attached a picture of Daisy. “She is progressing well in rehab. Thank you for your prayers.”
He hadn’t remembered to pray for the falcon.
God, he realized, had not been so negligent.
So that is when I began to sense what the great birds have to teach us, Matt wrote at Shorehaven. But I cannot understand it. Since my heart attack, I am beginning to realize how limited I am, how mysterious everything is. So, I am trying to write, but I must admit that I do not open my heart with ease. Pausing to read over what I’ve written, I find my choice of words intriguing. Perhaps an illness of the heart should not have surprised me.
Alone in Shorehaven, he prayed for Daisy. At that moment, he felt a terrible pang of loneliness, as if the act of supplication had erased the distance he’d placed between himself and his own humanity.
He wanted something.
He opened his laptop and began to write an email. “You have an extraordinary gift with animals,” he wrote to Alison. “I regret that I did not acknowledge it sooner. I pray that both you and Daisy remain well.”
He read what he had written. Too personal, he thought. He deleted it. Then, he wrote, “Blessings to you and your ministry with Daisy.”
That, he thought, would be enough.
We Can Only Tell Stories
MATT WAS STUNNED BY ALISON’S RESPONSE to his email. “Dear Fr. Matt,” she wrote. “I believe the care of Daisy to be my vocation. In my father’s memory, I attend to her. I was only ten when we lost him. The attached may help you understand why this creature is so important in my life.”
It touched him that Alison would entrust him with her thoughts. He had known so little about her.
Five years before I was born, my family left Boston for the lakeside city of Toronto, home of ravines and vanished rivers, of words spoken in a multitude of tongues, the first of which is silence. My parents never had much to say about that time, except that in his youth, my father refused a war, my mother concurred, and they preferred to live on the better side of a hopeless argument between young men and death.
Only my parents never mentioned that no one wins that argument.
My father Paul found a job teaching geography at the University of Toronto. Although well-liked by students, he was a quiet and solitary man, and apart from classes and academic meetings, he was just as happy to keep to himself. He was tall, fair-haired, and lanky, and his blue eyes crinkled — his whole face, in fact — whenever he looked upward, as if he were trying to glimpse some incredible brightness without doing harm to his vision. In his stance, his reserve, his comfort with the outdoors, he was a man you might have mistaken for a farmer. He kept a garden and enjoyed gazing at whatever bright stars might emerge in the dark of a city night.
Later, my dad told me that he was living in Boston when he took up the study of falconry. It made me think that Boston must be a special place, one that encouraged the love of animals and nature, and I asked my dad if we could visit the city, but he would only say, “We’ll see.” We never did go.
One day, I decided that when I grew up, I would look after sick animals, reclaim the place my father loved and live there on my own.
Mom and Dad bought a house on a shaded side street near St. Clair and Christie, one that meandered through a hilly west-end neighbourhood, alive with the seasonal commotion of migrating birds and playful squirrels, and there I walked through my childhood, hand in hand with my parents.
My dad would teach me about birds while my mother Jeannette photographed them. I was very small, and songbirds were my favourites — tiny, gemlike creatures, not the fearsome hawks and falcons that my father loved. I didn’t tell him this, and besides, it didn’t seem to matter at the age of six when everything is new, when so much happens for the first time.
Dad showed me the tracks of rabbits, the delicate imprints of sparrows and pigeons in the snow, the places where squirrels gathered their nuts for the winter. And when it snowed, I would fall into a state of awe and wonderment if a squirrel jumped, shaking snow from his branch all over me. I’d feel blessed at that moment, filled with a deep inner silence, as if we were in church, at Benediction. We were Catholics and everything felt holy, so as we walked together, I prayed for all the creatures in the wild.
As a child, I thought of God as most children do: as a giver of gifts, as the one who answers prayers.
I prayed for my mother. Dad took me to Sunday Mass, but Mom was often away on assignment and didn’t go with us. When I asked Dad why, he said, “God is everywhere. She’ll find him.”
So, I thought at first that my mother was off on a special journey, looking for God. As a photojournalist, she worked with Lucien, a colleague from Radio-Canada. The two of them spoke French, and my dad did not, so she spoke to me, and I learned it with ease. It sounded like birdsong—its bright precision, its notes made of air.
My dad also said that you went to church for the comfort of praying with others. He had a young friend named Edward who sometimes joined us for Mass. He loved nature and was very kind to me, although he did not always seem happy, so I prayed for him, too.
Here is a prayer my father wrote: “Loving God, Tender Bird brooding on the world, protect us.”
Matt went back and read what she wrote. “In his youth, my father refused a war.”
He recalled that Alison had mentioned this a few months back, repeating things, as she often did: that her father had been a falconer, that he had to abandon the sport, preoccupied with fleeing to Canada, avoiding Vietnam. He saw now that the man had planted a seed of integrity in his daughter’s soul. Schooled in her father’s radical choice, Alison would feel empowered in her calling, however odd the tending of Daisy might look to others. Perhaps she wished to make this point, and that was why she’d sent him her reflections.
Had he stayed in Canada with Valerie, how different his own life might have been.
Matt wrote her back:
Alison, thank you for the kindness and trust you have shown me in letting me read your heartfelt reflection. So many of life’s questions seem not to have answers. Perhaps we can only tell stories, as Jesus did. I also find writing a helpful spiritual practice.
I will say your father’s prayer, and I will remember your intentions at Mass.
God bless you,
Fr. Matt.
Elias
TOUCHED BY ALISON’S WRITING, Matt used some of his time at Shorehaven to reflect on his deep connection with the city of her birth, with his own secrets that lay hidden there. In 2010, just over a year before his heart attack — and not long after Alison joined the parish — Matt had gone north to Toronto for a semester of teaching. A vanished summer echoed in the city’s name, the place where he’d abandoned Valerie, but time had passed and life brought him now and again to the peaceful lakeside city for conferences and meetings of an academic nature, most of them connected to his writings on psychology and religion. He was to be a guest scholar and lecturer on Addiction and Spirituality — a new subject for the Catholic college on the east campus of the University of Toronto. He was looking forward to some time away from home.
Matt boarded a plane at Logan Airport, placing his foot with care upon the first step, then on the second, his movements slow, almost stately, as if he were celebrating Mass, his eye fixed on the acolyte carrying the cross ahead of him. A private liturgy. Each step in the ritual — the stamping of the ticket at check-in, the clearing of security, the showing of passports — contained within it a shadowy resonance, a prayer for the dead on the flight he’d missed so many years ago, a reminder of the life he’d been granted by running late that distant morning.
He’d never forgotten Valerie.
Then, a year after the catastrophe, when he finally wrote her an apologetic condolence letter, she sent him — without comment — a prayer card with the name of the child he’d fathered before he left for Vietnam, his dates of birth and death. By checking passenger lists, he learned that the plane he had missed was the same one that had crashed into the young man’s building, setting a fire that killed him. Knowing these things, he had once thought of leaving the priesthood, then changed his mind, figuring he’d need the rest of his life to work this out, to read and write, to make his peace with the God of shadows.
He never spoke of this to anyone.
He did not like flying.
He thought of young Alison and her injured falcon.
Humans were never meant to fly, he thought.
He could feel himself falling into the cabin, zero gravity, sinking into his window seat. From his laptop case, he pulled out a book, tucked it into the pouch in front of him. The Sacred Universe. Years ago, he would have called it New-Age pap, authored by some frowzy feminist with braids and dream-catcher earrings. As if his own titles were any better: bestselling author of The Wide Web of Grace and Click if You Feel the Spirit. He cringed. Nowadays, he blogged and tweeted. He was a media go-to person for sturdy middle-of-the-road opinions on Catholic matters. Something of a celebrity for his academic work. Apart from that, he hadn’t written a decent book in years.
At that moment, he looked up to see a tall man ambling down the aisle, glancing at his boarding pass, eyeing the empty seat beside him. Young, slender, chestnut skin, beard, dark eyes that seem to click on him — drag and click, as if he were a paragraph about to be deleted. The man had a duffel bag and a laptop case; a smart phone bulged out of his jeans pocket. On his red T-shirt was a large black vulture-like bird and something written in bold Arabic strokes.
Probably says, “Al-Qaeda Falconry Club,” thought Matt. Hope they shoved him through the baggage scanner. Headfirst.
He took a deep breath, regretting how quick he was to judge.
His seatmate tossed his bag in the overhead bin, sat down beside him, and nodded hello. Matt acknowledged him, pulled out his book, and began to read. He sensed his neighbour watching him.
“Excuse me, I see you are reading The Sacred Universe?”
Matt’s eyes widened. “Just a few chapters.”
“I am a great admirer of Ms. Tucker and her papers on ecotheology. I am working on my thesis, also in ecotheology.”
