BIRDS and POETRY: I was watching some sparrows on the porch this morning. Two of them landed on the railing and just stood there for a few minutes, basking in the low winter sunlight. Sparrows must have a busy life, especially during mid-winter. Finding food on a short, cold February day when everything is covered with snow can’t be easy. So it’s nice when a few busy birds like that take a quick break outside my humble abode.
Those sparrows brought back a childhood memory. I was about 12 or so, and I was with my father and brother in Nationals, one of those big, dumpy, low-budget general stores something like the Odd Lots and Family Dollars of today. I pretty much grew up in stores like that. We were just looking around one weekend afternoon and came across some cheap birdfeeders made of molded plastic, not terribly attractive. Each birdfeeder had a little paper card attached with a drawing of birds on it, as you might expect. But the marketing people for this cheap-o birdfeeder used a sales ploy that I’ve never seen anywhere before or since, and which almost worked on us.
On the birdfeeder card, there was a short four-line poem. I don’t remember the exact words of that poem, but the gist of it was that hungry birds appreciate a good source of food, and in return will reward you with their song every morning. After the three of us perused the poem, we just stood there. No one in my family was particularly poetic, especially not my father, an instrument technician who helped build guidance devices for NASA and military rockets. And yet, somehow we had all fallen prey to the words of some frustrated poet making a few bucks writing ad copy for some flimsy plastic household items. I could feel the emotion well up in my throat. My father asked me if I thought we should buy it. Being at the age when a boy has to prove his toughness, I said no. He asked me if I was sure, and I said yea, so we moved on.
Despite my masculine boyhood coldness, the birds in the neighborhood kept on singing every morning. So today, after I saw those sparrows, I threw some breadcrumbs out on the porch. Come to think of it, my brother has some kind of birdfeeder at his house too. Hey, better late than never.
You know, it might be a better world if advertisers used a little more poetry.
BELIEF IN GOD: I wonder how many people settle their belief or non-belief in God early in life, and how many (like me) waffle back and forth? I read a quote a few weeks ago that still bothers me a little. It was by some European firebrand from many years ago, the kind of bearded, radical guy who took Marx and socialism seriously. The fellow was expressing his disdain for the average family, who dutifully shuffled down to the village church every week to praise God despite the misery of their circumstances. The firebrand in question said that he would not join them, as he would not stoop to “licking the boots” of a cruel eschatological master; instead, he was going to devote all his attention to building a utopia in the here and now.
If you really believed that this world could be turned into a utopia, I suppose this fellow would have a point. But our world seems rather utopia-resistant. Therefore, spiritual awareness and “otherworldliness” is perhaps not such a bad idea. Nevertheless, there remains the age-old “problem of pain” to deal with. How do you cozy up to a God who put us into such a utopia-proof world? I guess that all you can do is hope that there is something better after death, that our present world is mostly a kind of training ground, some sort of big classroom where the lessons are painful because the outcomes really do matter. (Being an “eternal student”, that is an appropriate metaphysical perspective for me). Or let’s hope, anyway.
Oh, by the way, that doesn’t mean that we can just let this world go to hell. Even if it is just a classroom, we will get graded on our classroom projects. And the best class project is the one about making things better for the poor and the oppressed, and preserving the beauty of nature through environmental protection.