Kingsview
When
Something Takes
the
Babies
Michael
A. King
She
pulled out dry grass. Then she hopped into
a bush to weave it in. Alerted to the new construction project, all of
us kept tabs on it and celebrated as the robin, joined often by her
mate, completed a fine round condo. Soon four eggs, colored, yes,
“robin’s-egg blue,” nestled in it.
She began sitting
duties. To avoid
unsettling her, mostly we watched from afar. Except when she’d leave
we’d allow ourselves to gaze right into the nest built just inches from
a window. We also took in the dramas that erupted when bad birds or
squirrels drew too near.
At last the big
day: nest turns
maternity ward. Commotion everywhere. Soon arrives an image that seems
almost cliché come to life: Papa or Mama with fat worm dangling.
Then: tragedy. Nest
empty. No little
birds. A very bad thing has befallen the robin family. Deflation hits
our human family.
Just one more nest
emptied by a
predator. Just one more reminder of how truly nature is, as Alfred Lord
Tennyson famously put it, “red in tooth and claw.” But the nest had
seemed so alive, its bird family such a sign of spring, new beginnings,
the ability of even tiny brains to prepare for, give birth to, care for
children! It was hard not to ponder what to make of the stillness and
its mute testimony to the reality that things go not only right but
also often wrong.
I wondered what
this might say about
human families. And I found my mind wandering toward all the torn
pieces in those many circles of family radiating back from and in front
of me. I thought of that shotgun ending a life in that pasture. Of that
broken pelvis leading to the meningitis that killed her when, as taking
the meds became once more a struggle, she jumped out her window. Of the
predisposition toward anxiety and depression that seems to run through
generation after generation in one family wing. Of those who once to a
child seemed giants yet have been felled by strokes, cancer, dementia.
I thought of how
often over the years
I’ve heard from or about those suffering faith crises when the trust
that “God will take care of you,” as Civilla and Walter Martin put it
in their gospel song, smashes into the reality that this woe, that
frailty, the relentless winding down age brings will end at a graveside
ceremony where those gathered will seek assurance that God does still
take care.
And I thought this:
If faith is to be
worth much at all, then it needs to face squarely the predations both
robins and people face. Does faith pass the test? Often not. We keep
faith alive by telling ourselves stories of the times it seems God does
care and not telling of the times God seems not to care. I will confess
to being tempted to leave church in anger when I hear one more account
of how, amid the bodies mangled by this accident or that disease, the
one giving testimony was miraculously spared by a loving God. Yes? So
God was on lunch break when the babies were stolen?
I know which
answers to the riddle of
vacant nests and a caring God leave me feeling empty myself. I don’t
know how to solve the riddle. In fact, I’d guess it can’t be solved. I
protest simplistic evocations of God’s care. Yet does it get us any
farther to commit to faith in “Life’s a [word not appropriate for DreamSeeker Magazine
] and then you
die”? Plus it so
happens “Be not dismayed what’er betide,” the first line of the
Martins’ song, can draw my tears.
And what am I or we
to make of this:
In delving into the history of “God Will Take Care of You,” I learned
that Civilla also wrote another favorite, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”
But not robins, right?
Except Civilla
isn’t quite so easily
dismissed: She wrote “Sparrow” after visiting the Doolittles, one of
them long bedridden, the other confined to a wheelchair. Yet brightness
surrounded them. When asked why, reported Civilla, Mrs. Doolittle said
simply that “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.”
A day after I found
the nest empty,
two robins scrambled off the roof near the nest. Down to the lawn to
pull at worms they flew. If they were the bereft parents, God’s eye on
their children hadn’t spared them. I doubt their robin theology was
better than mine at making sense of that riddle. Still amid death they
were alive. I dared hope that if not in the answers they and I don’t
have, then at least in our riddles God lurks.
—Michael
A. King, Telford,
Pennsylvania, is publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC; editor,
Dream
Seeker Magazine; and a
pastor and
speaker. This reflection was first published in The
Mennonite June
2, 2009), as a "Real
Families" column.
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