Seeking the Awe of Creation Despite Desolation

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I’ve gone birdwatching a couple of times since the beginning of the new year, and each time despite the paucity of birds I managed to return with at least one decent photo. That includes the day when during a two-mile hike I saw only three birds. Not three species; three birds. Total. Two were Steller’s jays, the third was a wild turkey, which paused for a moment on the trail in front of me, then trotted into the trees, where it passed through low-hanging branches at just the right spot for me to get a decent photo of it. Another highlight was yesterday, when I spent four hours walking and driving at my favorite refuge. The water near the road was frozen, which meant most of the birds were too far out to view. There was, however, a flock of gulls close to shore.

Before I continue this tale, I should confess that for the most part all gulls look alike to me. With few exceptions the adults have grayish bodies, white heads and black-tipped wings, while the juveniles are various shades of brown shading to gray. After five years of study, I’m fairly confident in identifying the adults of the three most common species found in Utah – the California, ring-billed and Herring gulls, which have subtle differences in size, leg color and markings on the bill. Easier to spot are the occasional adult Lesser black-backed and Glaucous gulls, because they are distinctly different from the other species. Their names imply their appearance; the former has a black rather than gray back, and the latter is white rather than gray.

Distinguishing juvenile gulls is a whole ’nuther story. Their feathers can be more or less brown or more or less gray. They may or may not have the same size, leg color and bill markings as the adult of their species. So it is a source of pride that yesterday I spotted among the gulls a juvenile that seemed different. Granted, it was brown and gray, with a black-tipped bill – a description that fits 99.9 percent of juvenile gulls regardless of species. And yet the pattern of this one’s feathers appeared somehow different.

I took a photo and studied it on the back of the camera. From the picture, and then looking at the live bird, it seemed to me that its head was rounder than the other gulls.

Not daring to get my hopes up, I posted the photo to a local birdwatching Facebook page, and was rewarded with an authority confirming that my bird was a Short-billed gull, a rarity in Utah and a species I’d never before seen.

I tell this story because after photographing the Short-billed gull, I went for a long walk, during which I had a talk with God about my spiritual life. I mentioned to the Creator that recently there’s been a lack of “God moments” – those times when my attention is caught in awareness of the holy presence.  I also haven’t had much intellectual enlightenment, despite my reading on various theological issues.

Pondering this, it occurred to me that I may be passing through the spiritual equivalent of winter or, to use the technical term, a period of desolation. Nevertheless, I am getting the occasional glimpse of God: another writer, completely unprompted, sent me a photo of the Holy Land that led me to include a description of the place that strongly improved a piece of creative writing I was working on. When I was younger I would have attributed this to coincidence, but now I see a munificent Spirit working as my advocate.

It’s also possible that I’ve allowed some parts of my spiritual life to become commonplace, just as I now automatically catalogue yellow-rumped warblers and red-tailed hawks without the thrill that identifying them had when I first began birdwatching. There seems to be little new to glean in my daily spirituality, and delving deeper into Scripture or theological writers seems more effort than I want to expend right now. Although I must admit that my current book, God in Search of Man, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, is providing plenty of nuggets for contemplation. Among those tidbits is this, which I read last night: “When Adam and Eve hid from his presence, the Lord called: Where art thou (Genesis 3:9). ... Faith comes out of awe, out of an awareness that we are exposed to his presence, out of anxiety to answer the challenge of God, out of an awareness of our being called upon. Religion consists of God’s question and man’s answer. ...” (Italics original.)

Awe is the anthesis of the indifference with which I’ve been approaching life these days. Heschel writes quite a bit about awe, how it is lacking in the modern world, how it is the proper approach to God, how it helps humankind see the sacredness in each speck of creation. So my morning prayer now is to ask the Spirit to open my eyes to see God’s grandeur each day. Despite my desolation, I believe I may still see such sparks.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie@icatholic.org.