Fly me home

John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. (Luke 3:16)

I saw them before I heard them, which is unusual for sand hill cranes. Their bugle calls and alto trill carry a couple of miles or more, and they fly so high you can topple backward while craning your neck to find them.

But today they appeared framed in the glass of the patio doors, which I scrambled to open, eager to welcome their joy into my wintered heart. How beautiful are the wings of those who bear hope’s holy promise.

Excitement for an unusually warm March day surely fanned their enthusiasm as they cried high to one another. Calls answered calls, weaving an ecstatic crescendo of delight, faster and louder, shouting over each other like children released for recess, voices over voices in a glorious cacophony of joy, as they made their way home to summer nesting grounds.

‘You came back,’ I whispered to the crystal blue dome of heaven’s splendor, tears of gratitude the best prayer I’d offered in weeks.

Tears are always interesting. They tell you what you love, what you need, what you hope for and when you have been graced beyond your capacity for middle-class composure.

Damn that.

Give me more of those tears, wordless prayers, born of the Spirit’s fire, that baptize the soul and wash away the muck that clings to the heart and paints the world gray.

Tasting the tears of hope renewed, my silent soul thanked the heavens for the utter goodness and total gratuity of being alive, winging my earth-bound heart to join the cranes raptured praise of the Loving Mystery who breathes life’s holy sweetness into every single moment … and begs us to take a breath.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Surely, the cranes know, their calls and cries, delight in flight and grace in the dance of landing, are a prayer of gratitude for having received a life to live and love, bidding us to embrace the lives we have been given—loving our days as best we can, savoring the graces that come our way, releasing our insistence that our lives and the world should be less messy and confounded than they are.

In the impenetrable alchemy of the Spirit, who wastes nothing and uses everything, the cranes migration carried me home. For at least one blessed moment, my heart and the Heart of Love, who made the cranes to fly and me to praise their beauty, were no longer two but overlapping circles merged as one, one love, loving everything that is, even myself, which can be the hardest of all.

Is not knowing this, feeling this oneness in love, what it means to be baptized in the Spirit’s fire? I think so, or at least that’s what the cranes told me … as they made their way home.