A Bird Feeder Prayer

The temperature today here in Central Texas will climb to near 70 and we will be greeted by a drizzling rain. There are at least a dozen birds on the tube-like feeder that hangs from the mesquite tree branch bending over our Western facing patio. As I watch the birds during my morning meditation time, they remind me of a very different winter morning in Maine not long ago. Right now the temperatures there in the Western Mountains foothills have plummeted and the snow is falling. Memories take me back to my cozy, snow-capped home and the hungry birds outside my window there. Join me as I describe another early morning prayer time one morning in Maine.

This morning I started out the day in prayer as I often do, but today the weight of a friend’s grief and confusion pressed down on me. I turned to my familiar prayer habits: picturing that person being held in God’s care; praying for comfort and strength; invoking that nameless something that would convey itself to her as she also rises this morning, many thousands of miles away. As always, I am not quite sure my prayers go further than the chemical reactions in my brain that cause thoughts to appear and disappear. I pray for things to happen, or not to happen; I ask for specifics or carefully stick to generalities; I pray with a grateful heart or one that is full of anger and resentment. I demand justice or I seek forgiveness. I pray despite my doubts and I pray because of them.

It comforts me a little that I share the confusion about whether prayer really works with great religious thinkers through the ages up to the present day. I have books with dog-eared pages on my office shelves that probe prayer’s mysteries and meanings. I have, secreted away in my box of old journals, a beautiful collage of prayers and promises for a hoped-for child who never got the chance to take a breath here on earth. I have lists of prayers that go back decades. Yet all of these things don’t uncover prayer’s mystery or even, I must admit, prove that it makes any difference to me or to others or even to God. Contemporary writer Barbara Brown Taylor wades into the briar patch that is prayer by describing it in a way I can begin to grab hold of. Prayer, she says, is a way to wake up more fully to God’s presence.¹ This seems so very simple and yet so very true that it squelches my desire to run off to my reference shelves and dig into a theological study on prayer’s deeper meaning. No, instead I decide to stay here awhile in my customary morning spot that I have come to recognize as a place of God’s presence. This winter morning the snow is pouring again, the snow plow has just made its second run up the hill, and my plans to go to the library down in the village must be put aside until tomorrow or the day after that. Certainly this seems like the perfect opportunity to just pay attention to what I am doing. I am open to the idea that this paying attention stuff is a portal into God’s presence, and that prayer may be a particular way to pay attention. I decide that I can put aside a lot of the why questions, or please entreaties, or whendemands that characterize much of my prayer life. I pause and clear my mind. Perhaps it is not too surprising that nothing much happens while I think these deep thoughts, except for the growing drifts of snow and the popping fire…and a growling stomach.

As I get up to go to the kitchen to mix up a blueberry buckle for breakfast (my freezer is still packed with summer-picked blueberries begging to be used), I glance outside my window at the bird feeder that my husband hung on Saturday. Because of the danger of bears here in the fall season, we put away our feeders a few months ago. There is so much bounty for the birds they don’t need it anyway. But just a couple of days ago, I noticed the birds flitting here and there with little to show for their efforts. As the Maine winter begins to wane, the snow banks have become chunks of ice. The birds can’t even begin to scratch through their solid surfaces, and our bushes have long since been stripped of their berries. At my urging, we fired up the four-wheel-drive pickup and headed to our local general store, coming home with a big bag of sunflower seeds. My husband climbed up in the garage rafters and found the bird feeder. He filled it up and installed it on a pole at the end of the front porch, positioning it for the perfect view from our den windows. We waited, and for almost 48 hours it sat there in cold isolation. Then in the late morning hours of yesterday, first one, then two birds appeared. Soon there were a half a dozen tufted titmice fluttering around the feeder, congregating under the windows or on the porch railing. These birds’ habit is to wait politely for one, then another to fly to the feeder, grab a seed and return to the nearby bush to crack open the hard shell with its beak. These little birds don’t all rush the feeder demanding and grabbing for their share. They don’t fuss and squawk at each other with complaints. They certainly don’t wonder why all of a sudden this rich repast has appeared, nor do they worry whether tomorrow it will be gone. They just feed, and wait, and feed again, and in between bites they fluff up their feathers to guard against the bitter cold.

How does this circle around to my jumbled thoughts about prayer? I see it has to do with paying attention to what is around me, waking up to what is right outside my window. Prayer is an offering, just as surely as the black-oil sunflower seeds that sit there waiting to be enjoyed. Prayer is also the birds, who know when to wait, and when to feed, and when to care for their feathers so they don’t freeze. Prayer is the hands that hung the feeder and the eyes that watch it. Prayer simply is. It is the holy, timeless practice of being in the presence of God. Petitions fall away, puzzling questions are quieted, demands for action fade into the background. The gathering of flour and milk and eggs and blueberries is put aside for a while longer. I return to my cozy chair. Right now, I am watching my birdfeeder, and somehow, that is enough.