In the stillness of an early morning, on a day, when the sky was blue with an overcoat of white glistening clouds, I found these birds in our garden waiting for the morning to break! They were looking ready to begin their day, alert and vigilant. The night vigil was over!
During a car travel yesterday, half of our journey was in heavy rain with intermittent lightning and thundering. The traffic moved slowly and the roads had few inches of water causing splashing of water to all sides. A few times the splash on the front windscreen blinded the sight of the road for a few seconds.
While gathering the above photos, I remembered the clear sky on the day I took the photographs and the cloudy, and rainy day yesterday, both giving me an occasion to dwell on the movements in nature!
It became to me a metaphor of human behaviour. Following the American presidential election, a contrasting attitude became obvious. The political polarisation even after the election is over, is obvious with an oppositional attitude towards each other. The America is a nation of people and not a divided people along an ideological conflict is yet to be owned and expressed by the political leaders.
Anna received messages from friends living in Germany about their political traction towards right wing politics of alienation and racial prejudice, which is more evident in Germany, since the Second World War.
I go back to the blue sky and white clouds, which is a symbol of the glorious orientation that we are called to consider as our heritage! We are co-inhabitants of the earth and neighbours to each other, living under the canopy of grace, that brings together people of diverse background to make it a humanity of co-pilgrims on earth. The clouds move about; similar humans also move between positions morally, socially and behaviourally.
The blue sky brings under its canopy the glistening clouds symbolising the humanity on a movement path!
Now that babies can be incubated technically for nine months outside the human womb, we inhabit an earth, which will make everything different and more complex ethically and socially. The politics will no more be ideology centric, but millionaire centric, who by virtue of their control, exert pressure to conform to a narrow corridor of convenience which would benefit a few and not all alike.
Yet some would still live on the earth, believing that "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world and all who live in it; for He founded it on the seas and established it on waters" (Psalm24:1-2). In that concise and converging statement in Romans 11:36, "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things..", there is hope for humankind in complex times. Our lives are destined for a purpose beyond the existential, material and temporal.
In the return of the prodigal son to his father, a parable of Jesus of Nazareth (Luke 15:11-32), after the meandering through indulgent living and exploration of wild aspirations of his carnal instinct, we have a message of hope on two accounts: humans returning to their roots in God and the gracious Father longingly waiting for the return of humans to their roots!
The river has an origin and a destiny. It shall not change although technology can influence it.
The sky is the canopy of grace regulating the cloud movements! I want to believe that God overviews the destiny of all beings on the planet earth! That is why there are birds in the garden every day, singing their song for others at day break!
This invites me into a vocation in life! The invocation is, "Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbour" (I Corinthians 10:24)!
M.C.Mathew (text and photo)
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