I've frequently played around with two of my long time enthusiasms, birds and theology. Ornitheology is a form of celebration of the beauty of created nature, birds and God, vulnerability and protection, not one sparrow falls to the ground, said Jesus, but God notices, and is sad.
As long as I can remember I've been fascinated by the beauty and peculiarities of birds, especially the smaller birds native to Scotland and which used to be far more numerous than they are now. The impact of human activity on those other creatures who share our countryside has been a mixed bag of blessing and devastation. Many of the most common birds are now in serious decline, several are moving towards endangered status.
So on a long walk along the Moray Coastal Way today it was a joy to be accompanied at various stages by birdsong and bird movement. I stood several times just listening to skylarks, that trilling music of exuberant joy in flight, and for me a reminder of lying in a farm cottage bedroom, window open at 6.a.m. and hearing precisely that melody of the blythe spirit of Spring.
Walking along a path which at times became a gorse canyon there was a heartening series of encounters with yellowhammers. Ever since as a boy I discovered a yellowhammer's nest in a hawthorn hedge, and identified it in the ISpy book of birds by its warning call, I've found in this beautiful bird a heartening song, and a source of uplift in that brassy yellow face.
Wrens are amongst those that due to human encroaching on land and living space are far less common today. So when one decided to eyeball us on the path that too was cause for a surprising hopefulness and gratitude for such courage contained in one of nature's loveliest miniatures.
Walking and looking, standing and listening, can become intentional acts of devotion. Prayer and how we relate to God is complex as it is, given our own variations of mood, experience, circumstance and life story. For myself a landscape can be a psalm, sky reflected on a river a silently breathed alleluia, a skylark song a private audience with one of the greatest ever singers, and the rhythm of waves and the sight of those white curved surges of energy collapsing in delight at reaching shore, is a liturgy of which I could never tire.
And the swallows have returned. Reminding me, as they always have since I first read Psalm 84, that a long time ago a poet stood and looked up to the joists of the temple and saw a swallow's nest, and was reminded of the imaginative care and faithful attentiveness of God: "Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a place to nest in your house."
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