Epiphany 2024: A New Year's Message from the Birds

In the spring of 2023, I was going on a little walk through the woods with one of my friends (hey, Chrystie!) when she took out her phone to use an app to identify some plants that sparked her curiosity. We did that a few times, and I didn’t think too much of it, because usually when I’m curious enough about a plant to know something more about it I just ask my husband Joel, because he knows EVERYTHING about plants. (OK, maybe not EVERYTHING, but enough for any casual interest I might have from time to time.) At some point though, during our walk, she also used an app to identify some birdcalls that we wanted to know more about, and my brain exploded! (Not literally, thank God.)

Shortly after returning home from that visit to Virginia, I downloaded “Merlin” to my phone, and I’ve been hooked ever since!

Just a month or two prior to that visit, Joel and I moved to Ballenger Creek, MD, about an hour west of Baltimore City where we’d lived for many, many years. In our new home, I take many more opportunities – sometimes daily – to be in nature and to explore my surroundings, including hiking up mountains, strolling alongside rivers, and now, identifying birds! I’ve been learning all about my new hobby, including its language (pro tip: it’s called “birding;” “birdwatching” is literally a spectator sport in comparison), and even joining the local chapter of the Maryland Ornithological Society. That now makes two separate MOS’s that my household is a member of, through Joel, who is an active member of the Maryland Orchid Society. Anyway, birding gets me up and out of the house doing things that I find interesting, and it’s good for both my physical and mental health. I love it.

Now that I am a fledgling birder (ha! see what I did there?), I am constantly listening for birdsong and peering through my new pair of binoculars trying to identify species by what I hear and see. THEY ARE EVERYWHERE! How did I not notice them before? Why did they all kind of just look/sound the same and blend into the background? I cannot believe the incredible diversity of avian species; they are endlessly fascinating. So, when the new year rolled around, it was almost a game for me to find out what my first birds of 2024 would be…

Because I heard the loud caw of an American crow before I could even leave my house, I made a mental note of that and went out to find the first bird I would actually see for the new year. From the car on my way to a New Year’s Day hike with Joel, I saw a vulture soaring in the distance. It was most likely a turkey vulture, since that is what is predominantly present around here this time of year – but it was too far away, and I know too few positive distinguishing markers between it and the black vulture from that distance, so I also made a mental note of that and kept driving. Then whoosh!, a red-shouldered hawk flew by. Three different birds, each one closer, in the span of a few short minutes. A treat! And what could these birds portend?

*****

Around Thanksgiving of last year, I ordered and received a copy of Queers the Word: A 40-Day Devotional for LGBTQ+ Christians. I calculated that if I started the following Monday, November 27, it would take me through Advent and I would finish on January 5, the last day of the Christmas season; indeed, I finished the devotional yesterday, and it was a great spiritual practice for me to engage with a friend. Today, January 6, is Epiphany, which (in Western Christianity) is a celebration of the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Broadly speaking, however, an epiphany can be any manifestation of the divine breaking through to us mortal folk, whether that be as an apparition, as inspiration, as an idea, as an omen…as the birth of a holy child…as…birds? Hrm…

The first person I thought about while that bird was screaming its head off outside my bedroom window was my friend and colleague Mathew P. Taylor, the second anniversary of whose death we just commemorated in December. I can’t even begin to describe what a warm embrace that cawing was to my spirit. If I had been using the Merlin app, it would have identified what I was hearing as Corvus brachyrhynchos, or the American Crow. What my spirit immediately heard was Mathew saying, “hey, friend! I pulled a card for you, and I want you to know…you got this! Have a great year!” What a blessing. Mathew is still with me.

And then I saw, but did not positively identify, a turkey vulture, Cathartes aura. In my short eight months as a novice birder, I have come to understand that vultures generally get a bad rap. They are commonly seen as ugly, perhaps gross, and may even be feared. But the more I encounter these supposedly ugly, gross, and fearsome creatures, the more I have come to appreciate them. They play a vital role in their ecosystems, often consuming the carcasses of other animals that have died – their scientific name means “purifier,” and it is cognate with the word catharsis. Incidentally, they also eat other things, like fruits. They are also kind of beautiful up close, somewhat statuesque, certainly graceful, and they actually seem to be rather good-tempered despite human misgivings. At least around here! And so I thought to myself…what can it mean for me to be encountering this turkey vulture on New Year’s Day? Well, there is a lot about this world, and my experience of it, that is ugly, gross, and fearsome…but through the example of this hulking bird, perhaps I can learn to consume and be nourished by those things in me that have died, or that need to die, to help purify and keep my spiritual ecosystem healthy. Perhaps I can come to see that the past – and the present – that I constantly ruminate over doesn’t have to maintain a death grip on my life; perhaps if I look closely, I can find the beauty and grace in my experience, learn from it, and let it go, soaring like the vulture into a brighter day…

Finally, the red-shouldered hawk, Buteo lineatus. I haven’t learned to identify many hawks yet, and the meaning of its scientific name, “lined buzzard,” doesn’t hold any apparent spiritual significance for me. Most of the hawks I can identify around here are red-tails. But this one was clearly a red-shouldered hawk – the first bird that I both saw and positively identified this year, though I did not hear its call. One of the main things that hawks are known for is their keen eyesight. Because of their visual acuity, hawks can see very clearly objects that are up to 100 feet away, enabling them to hunt efficiently and effectively from great soaring heights. For this reason and others, hawks are often symbols of seeing “the big[ger] picture,” with the red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks serving additionally as symbols of spiritual vision, clarity, forward movement, and an efficient and effective pursuit of goals and dreams. WHAT? I’m too superstitious to say anything more about that right now lol I don’t want to jinx myself. Let’s just say that this is very encouraging!

So there you have it. I have begun 2024 with a threefold (hahaha) epiphany, a divine manifestation with a message for my life this year: 1) those who love me are rooting for me and have my back, 2) the past, though it may seem bad and dead, can nourish me and sustain my life, but only if I purify my relationship with it and learn to let it go, and 3) I can and will soar, clearly spotting my goals and dreams, and moving forward to grab hold of them. Whew! I am encouraged. May you, too, find encouragement in your life as you pursue your own dreams.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

 

 

Seeking Sanctuary

In my experience, when people are asked why they became Unitarian Universalists, or why they remain Unitarian Universalists, one of the reasons most often cited is community.  We seek groups of people who are like-minded, or who have similar values, with whom we can connect and to which we might belong. It’s a perfectly human desire, and Unitarian Universalist congregations provide that home that many of us need, especially when we feel that we would not be comfortable or would not be wholly accepted in any other of the spheres we inhabit in our lives.

When I first became a UU, now half my life ago, I, too, sought community. I sought a place where I could be me – a black, gay, young man, raised a Christian but seeking…something. I sought a place where I could pose questions about God, where I could ask “why?” without fear of reprisal, where I could confidently assert “I don’t believe that!” without fear of rejection. And I believe I found that place.

But community is noisy. Community is different people coming together with all their joys and all their hurts, their assuredness and their confusion. Community of the people by the people and for the people is an exercise in controlled chaos at times. Community means serving on committees, task forces, councils and boards in the interest of perpetuating said community. Community is busy, and loud, and satisfying, and depleting, and beautiful, and replenishing, and rough. Community is competing wants and needs seeking resolution. Community is strength and community is effacement. Community is multivalent – as many different things as the people within it, and much more.

And although community is very important to me, it has never been my primary reason for joining or remaining a member of a church. My answers to that question about becoming a UU usually sound like “exploring my spirituality” or “cultivating my theology”. My answers about remaining a UU usually sound similar, with the added component of a deep love for this faith I found all those years ago. Having benefitted from community for so long, I have come to a place in my life where what I need more even than the community I found is sanctuary.

Seder table set on the chancel in the sanctuary of the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore (Universalist & Unitarian), April 2010

Sanctuary is stillness. Sanctuary is safe vulnerability; sanctuary is comfort. Sanctuary is holiness, set apart from the mundane. Sanctuary is oneness of breath, oneness of purpose, oneness of intention. Sanctuary is showing up, sitting in a pew, and being nourished. Sanctuary is allowing others to do the hard raucous work of community, for a time. Sanctuary is self-care. Sanctuary is Sabbath rest - the opportunity just to be and not to do. Sanctuary is the quiet harmony of everything which is nothing which is within everything and nothing. Sanctuary is wholeness. Sanctuary is peace.

Community and sanctuary are not of necessity at odds with one another; they can both exist in the same space and at the same time. Somehow. One of the things I’ve discovered while exploring my spirituality and cultivating my theology, all within the framework of my UU community, is that God more often than not resides in the mystery of paradox. Sanctuary means being able to find an answer to “why?” and being able to say “I do believe this” without fear of reprisal or rejection.

Sanctuary is quiet silence. Today I seek the quiet.


#UULent reflection for Day 3: Quiet 

Drinking from Deep Wells: A Candlemas Reflection

I was a faithful member of the United Methodist Church from the age of 12 until I was 18 and in college. When I left, for good in my mind, at the age of 19, I told myself that I was a leaving behind a church that condemned me, a religion that left me malnourished, and a God who had forsaken me for eternity. In a period of less than two years, my spiritual journey led me along a path from doubting Christian, to anti-religious atheist, to inquisitive Unitarian Universalist. My dalliance with atheism was short-lived and half-hearted, and my embrace of Unitarian Universalism was initially borne of gratitude for discovering a way to be religious that allowed me to be rid of the Christianity that I’d left behind me. I have now been a Unitarian Universalist for 18 years – at 36 years old that’s half my life so far, following the 18 years I was a professing Christian, and threefold the years I belonged to the United Methodist Church with which I identified for so long. A lot about my theology and my religious outlook has changed in all that time, and I continue to reassess my beliefs as I age and have more life experience.

I remember a class called “The New UU” that I took at the first UU congregation I would join on my new path, which is now called the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair (NJ). In one of the early sessions, a gay former Catholic got into a heated debate with the minister leading the discussion about the role of ritual in Unitarian Universalism. This man was angry at even the merest suggestion that what would be his newfound faith should in any way resemble the one which had scarred him, which meant that there was absolutely no room for ritual of any sort, or even the word ritual itself. At the time, I thought he was being ridiculous; but in him I recognized the hurt that I, too, was feeling as a gay man ostracized by the faith of my upbringing. Who was I to judge him? Unfortunately, he did not find what he was looking for that evening, so he got up in a huff mid-class and he left. I sometimes wonder where his journey led him after that night. As for me, I decided that religion was still a worthwhile pursuit and I chose to remain.

My early years as a Unitarian Universalist were ones in which I was comfortable being dismissive of Christianity and also being around others who were equally or more dismissive. For a modern movement whose roots lie in two Christian denominations, it bewilders me how much we have come to embrace an overall disdain for our origins. Granted, I appreciated this tendency at first; but my years of study and open encounter with those UU’s who would still follow Jesus, not to mention my separation from the particularist and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible that I’d fled, rendered me less hostile to the faith of my upbringing than I’d once been. Reading the works of Marcus Borg, whom I declared to be my favorite theologian upon his death just a year ago, was a great influence on my willingness to not disregard and discard all the good that I’d known within Christianity. In my experience, many Unitarian Universalists are open to the wisdom of ABC religion – Anything But Christianity.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that I have come full circle and consider myself a Christian – I haven’t evolved that far, yet! – nor do I mean to imply that everyone can and should find that the Christian story is of ultimate value to their lives. I’m simply observing that, at some point, we became a faith that is comprised largely of people whose major impulse is to leave behind rather than to move toward. How do we overcome that?

In the eighteen years since I left Christianity behind me, I have attended Christian churches of various denominations only for weddings, funerals, and, after I met my husband and began observing Christmas again, Christmas Eve services. I once attended a Lutheran service on Palm Sunday because a nephew was being baptized. In almost every instance, I felt like an outsider. A welcomed and well-treated outsider, but an outsider nonetheless. Last year on Candlemas, a time of purification, preparation, initiation, and commitment, I decided that my spiritual life was spread too broadly and that I needed to choose the wells from which I would drink more deeply. On that day, I joined both the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship, having decided to stop fighting my background, and the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, having long ago come to the conclusion that an observance of the natural cycles of the earth, and of life, held great value for me. I’ve spent the year between that Candlemas and this embracing the idea of claiming a narrower path than the one I’ve been taking all these years. I began moving closer to the rhythm of the Christian liturgical cycle during Advent, reflecting on quiet hope in the dark of the year. I continued observance of the rhythm of the pagan wheel of the year, participating once again in my church’s Winter Solstice ritual. In eighteen years, I refused communion at every Christian service I went to where it was offered (except once a year, at most, in my own UU congregation where I could partake in good conscience). On this last Christmas Eve, after ten Christmases in a row of letting my husband and in-laws go up for communion and waiting behind, I led our pew up to the front of the church and partook with them. Just this weekend, I attended the Imbolc ritual of the Baltimore Reclaiming Community, where I honored the lengthening of days, asked a blessing on holy candles, gazed into the ignis purgans, and made a pledge to “live fully now” in the coming year. Next week brings Ash Wednesday... There’s something about these rituals that I’ve been missing in Unitarian Universalism, notwithstanding the sometime belief that there is too much ritual, as espoused by the wounded man I’d met so many years before as a new UU.

Part of what we as Unitarian Universalists value in religious life is the “encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations”, and we promote the “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life”. I have come to a point in my life where that means I must dig more deeply and draw from the wells that I have chosen for myself. The words of what some view as the Unitarian Universalist’s most sacred hymn plead “roots hold me close, wings set me free”. For the year ahead, I intend to explore ways in which I might be held close by my Christian roots and set free by Pagan wings. I will continue to be nourished from other wells, as they offer me their resources; but I will tend to my own at this time, and I will pray that this anchoring and expanding might continue to be held within my chosen faith community. Spirit of Life, come to me…come to me.