ON A WING AND A PRAYER

I recently finished reading Robert L. Harris’ memoir, Returning Light. Harris was the warden on Skellig Michael for over 30 years. Skellig Michael is a craggy rock that rises steeply 715 feet out of the Atlantic Ocean seven miles off the southwest coast of Ireland. Skellig Michael was inhabited by Celtic monks beginning in the 6th century but abandoned sometime around the English Reformation. Remote and inaccessible, a few thousand people visit every summer; and Harris is only on Skellig Michael from May to October to greet visitors as well as guard the island’s bird population.

Harris spends much of his book describing the thousands of seabirds who come to Skellig Michael each spring to breed and then depart in the late summer – puffins, gannets, razorbills, and storm petrels among others. Shortly before leaving one year, Harris rescues a downy puffin chick that has fallen from its nest. He takes it to the little hut where he lives and feeds it pieces of fresh pollock that he catches in the ocean. It bonds with him, waddling around his tiny hut and cuddling on his lap as she looks into his eyes.

As he’s leaving the island in early October, Harris takes this fragile, vulnerable puffin to the boat landing and sets her off into the night sky. She will spend most of the coming months at sea and, if she survives, will return to Skellig Michael the coming May to breed. This small creature setting out into the darkness of a vast sky and sea becomes for Harris a metaphor of his own journey through life. He wonders at her courage as well as her deep trust in whatever internal wisdom lies within her as she hesitantly takes flight into the night sky.

Our lives are full of transitions and moments of decision. We also experience seasons when we are nurtured and held by friends and family until we grow into whatever is coming next in our lives. In the Book of Job, the author ponders the birds and their migratory flights.
“Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars
and spreads its wings toward the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up
and makes its
nest on high? It lives on the rock and makes its home
in the fastness of the rocky crag.” (Job 39:26-29)

Although we don’t live on a rocky island seven miles into the Atlantic, birds around us are also taking flight.
According to BirdCast.info, 467,000 migrating birds passed over East Longmeadow on Tuesday night.
Their journeys ought to both amaze and inspire us. If such fragile, vulnerable creatures can entrust their
journeys to their Creator, surely we can entrust our lives to the One who creates, loves, and walks
alongside us whatever dark nights or bright seas we journey through.

As the American poet William Cullen Bryant wrote in his poem To A Waterfowl –
There is a Power, whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,—
The desert and illimitable air
Lone wandering, but not lost. . .
He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must trace alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

Pastor Thomas

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