Birdwatching with my Father

White-Throated Sparrow photographed by birding friend
Alan C Warren, Exton Park, 2020

Happy Father’s Day.

For years those words were far from welcome. My father vanished before I turned two. I saw him exactly once after that. He showed up for a visit when I was seventeen, then disappeared again.

From two to thirteen I lived in my grandfather’s house, but he wasn’t much of a father figure. He kept his own rooms locked: the master bedroom, a first floor study, a workroom in the basement. He walked around the house with keys rattling, shouting invectives or listening to baseball on his transistor radio. He had abused and alienated his own four sons and rarely spoke, except in bellowing abuse, to his estranged wife, my grandmother, who slept in a small sewing room at the other end of the house. The only meal he ate with us was Sunday dinner, which he monopolized with old jokes and pointless stories.   

When I was thirteen my grandfather decided he was done living in a house full of kids, so he sold the house and moved into an apartment by himself. I never saw him again. After that we had several years of disruption: living with people we didn't know, moving to new schools, always on the edge of homelessness. In four years, I lived in six different places, several times with families I had never met before.

Happy Father’s Day? I hated it. Everything about it.

When I was in third grade I earned a Bible by memorizing the books of the Old and New Testament - a little white Bible. I was a strange kid, more comfortable reading than talking, and I wandered through that little Bible, collecting things that I wanted to keep, writing verses on scraps of paper and memorizing them while I brushed my teeth at night:

Psalm 27: 10 Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.

Psalm 68:5 A father to the fatherless, a defender of the widows, is God in his holy dwelling.  

My grandmother’s heart-attack, at the end of my junior year of high school, created further disruption and drew me into a deeper experience of prayer. I found myself convinced that “father to the fatherless” was more than an abstract idea and that when Jesus told us to call his father “Abba,” he meant what he said: we were to consider God our daddy, the close, warm, loving father every fatherless child has watched and longed for from a distance.

That year I began a dialogue with God – more complaint than what I would have called prayer, almost passive aggressive in tone: If you’re REALLY my father, you’ll help me avoid ridiculous mistakes. If you’re REALLY my father, you’ll help me know what to do. If you’re REALLY my father, you’ll provide the money I need for college.

I can point back to very specific interventions in those late teen years as I careened in disastrous directions. I could tell of clear words of knowledge at moments of decision.  And I could explain how I went through college with no savings, no family support, and finished with enough money in the bank to cover my first year of grad school.

For decades now, I’ve been totally convinced of God’s provision and protection.

But even as a child, I saw a side to having a dad that goes way beyond provision and protection. I was jealous of kids who did things with their dads, who played games, made music, shared hobbies with their fathers.

I’ve been accused of anthropomorphizing God. I don’t think I do.

But I do believe in a personal, present, intervening God.

And I sometimes sense a closeness that’s hard to put in words.

So: birdwatching with my father.

I’ve been an active birdwatcher for ten years or so, learning bird calls, leading bird walks, planting native plants in my yard to attract a wider variety of birds. This summer I have nesting wrens, sparrows, flickers, grackles, bluebirds, chickadees, robins, woodpeckers.

In a whimsical thought, it occurred to me that God is a birdwatcher too. I can imagine the designer’s mind behind the lovely coloring in a flicker’s wings, or the soft shades of a bluebird’s egg.

Sparrows are hard to identify, but Jesus said “are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.”

When I lead bird walks, there’s a point in the walk where I remind the group of what normally expected birds we haven’t yet seen, alerting them to be watching. And I often suggest a few less-expected birds it would be fun to see.

Horned Larks photographed by birding friend 
Alan C Warren, Exton Park, 2020

Sometimes those birds show up in memorable ways: the kettle of broadband hawks the one day I said “we need some broadband hawks.” The delightful flock of horned larks the windy day I led the group across a frozen field.

I began to wonder, what if God wants to share his much-loved birds with us, as a father wants to share his favorite hobby?

One day I had been working on my computer for far too long without a break, and had a thought: I need to go outside. I jumped up, walked outside, looked at the sky, and there was a bald eagle, soaring low across the backyards beyond my own. It swooped and soared for several minutes then flew off. I had never seen an eagle so visible from my yard before and haven’t seen one since.

Another day I was in a frustrating fog: wrestling with plans that seemed to go nowhere, spinning my wheels in too many directions without getting much done.
I had that sense again: go outside. Quick.

I walked out to the woodsy area in the back of my yard and just stood still.

And heard the tiny voices of kinglets, all around me: Ruby-crowned kinglets. Golden-crowned kinglets. Swooping and circling and peering at me from branches near my head. More kinglets than I’ve seen in my yard at one time, before or since. I stood a while and enjoyed them, then went back to work. The next time I checked they were no longer there – just a fleeting visit, a fanciful gift.

Who am I, that God would invite me to watch his birds with him?

Who is God, to spare a thought for something so whimsical when the world is in chaos and grief?

It’s worth going back to that passage in Luke 12, where Jesus talked about sparrows.

He also talked about ravens:

They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! 

The passage invites the religious leaders, the crowd, the disciples, into a different kind of relationship: a close relationship of trust, of listening, of obedience. 

Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. 

Song Sparrow photographed by
birding friend Leslie Peed, Exton Park, 2015

Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 

What would it take to draw us deeper into that kind of faith, obedience, and freedom from fear?

For each of us, the answer will be different.

For me, right now, birdwatching with my Father is one more way of learning to trust, learning to listen, leaning into joy.

Happy Father’s Day!