What the bird said

What the bird said

‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.  When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. (Mathew 21:33-34)

My Saturday hike nearly done, seven miles behind me, the trail along Saganashkee Slough narrows to a foot path not 12 inches wide.  As I pick my way, boots squishing through the marsh, a great blue heron flaps across the lake toward a grove of lake lettuce along the north shore where I walk.

I call it lake lettuce because I don’t know its real name. A dense grove of thick stems rise from the shallows, each with a single shamrock-green leaf, hands waving in the cool autumn breeze that descends across the steep ridge of old oaks and walnut behind me.

From a distance, the grove looks like a small island, perhaps to the heron, too, as it heavily pumps its wings against the breeze, searching for a place to settle near and search for small fish. But seeing me, the great bird flaps once, hangs in mid-air, then squawks and turns west, drifting to the water’s flat surface streaked now with hues of gold and blue in the late afternoon light.

And I? I get to watch. I get to see … this, simply given, just there … for me to notice, feeling something that takes time to reveal itself. The heart, at least mine, is slow to catch up with what we hear and see and feel, if ever we do.

But 24 hours on, I think I hear something of what the heron was saying in his (or her) indecipherable squawk. I can make it out now. Two words: not mine.

That’s what the heron said. This world, the sunlight refracting on the water, the grandeur of a bird in flight (I have always been jealous of them); the dense woods where I walk among trees that were there before I was born and will last long after. None of it mine.

Nor even is my life, my breath, my body, my skills, my past and future, whatever it may be; to say nothing of the lives and loves near to me and those worlds away. All of it sheer, unadulterated gift. All of it belongs to what Jesus and Hebrew prophets before him sometimes called a vineyard, God’s vineyard.

And I get to live here. My privilege is the heron in flight, autumn light on the water, the feeling of my boots in the marsh, the October breeze whispering that winter is not far; all of it and quadrillions more, are not many things, but one great thing, one immense vineyard, one life, to be received with joy, tended with care and shared with all.

It seems to me that Jesus and my brother, the heron, were saying pretty much the same thing, letting me know what the owner of the vineyard always had in mind.

David L. Miller