Starting
Point Fashion some fly-away beauty
By JAMES STEPHEN
BEHRENS
The mother mourning dove and her
chick were side by side, enjoying the shade of a bush in our cloister. He was
only weeks old. He was smaller than his mother. Their heads turned as I neared,
but the birds did not move. I stood and watched them for a while and then
headed into church.
I have seen many cycles of nest building, egg sitting, hatching,
chick-sitting and training in the years I lived in the country. Once I peeked
into the foliage of a tree and saw a mother sitting on her chick, its tiny beak
and eyes protruding from the underside of her wing.
The mother birds last job is to keep a watchful eye on her
soon-to-depart young. There are no return visits once the young bird takes
flight.
A pastor I know collects porcelain birds and he keeps them in
little rows in a large cabinet. The brightly colored figurines are kept safe
and dust free behind large panes of glass. The little statues are beautiful. My
friend was easy to buy for at Christmas, and on his birthday I think of those
two birds I saw in the cloister. In the wild the beauty that is life is so
generous and yet precious. The mother and her chick are of a beauty unmatched
by the finest piece that rests behind glass in my former pastors
cabinet.
The beauty of the living is fleeting. It soon takes flight and
does not look back. We cannot possess it. Artists fashion beauty from clay and
oil and only then can we keep a facsimile of what flies beyond our grasp.
Time flies, and beauty takes flight with it. They do not look
back. Yet to look down and see the soft living beauty of that mother and her
chick gave me such pleasure. What a gift, really. A living gift. But beauty
indeed takes flight, and there is not much that we can hold onto forever. All
must grow and take flight to skies that beckon to hearts and provide
destinies.
Angels and birds have wings. Two species at different ends of the
spectrum of the living remind us that genuine beauty moves. It is a living
movement. I have read that the universe itself moves along some mysterious
path, and I then know that God has somehow affixed wings to all that God has
made. Life has wings. We were made to take flight.
Fashion some beauty this day, the flyaway type, the kind you
cannot keep but only give away. For it seems that true beauty has wings. We can
hold onto it for just a while, but the beauty that is most real does not exist
behind glass. It is a living mystery. It has places to go and beckons us to
follow. Say a prayer for one in need. Write a card to a friend. Speak a word of
love and hope to one who needs it. Give someone a lift with the wings of your
heart.
Fr. James Behrens lives and writes in Covington, La.
National Catholic Reporter, May 10,
2002
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