Birds

By Egeria

Here is the way bird-watching usually works: Walk by thistles; pine siskins are eating the seeds. In tall grasses song sparrows jump up occasionally into view. On isolated trees bluebirds perch between their fly-catching flights. Pass into open woods; a flicker jumps from the ground into the trees. Where the undergrowth is dense, towhees hunt on the ground. Wander deeper into the woods; find chickadees in the spruce and juncos on the ground. Each type of bird has a neighborhood it prefers. When my husband and I walked in a meadow in the Rockies one morning we found a place where, because of a brook hidden by tall grass and bushes near woods, all kinds of birds paused in the same bush. We admired sleek pine skins and tiny chickadees, towhees, warblers, and brilliantly red-winged flickers without turning our heads. The scene recalled our weekend just past, when we had worshiped with Reconciling United Methodists of many races from all over the United States and a few visitors from Africa, South America and Philippines. The diversity of the congregation was not in our geographical origins, though, so much as in our sexual identities and ages. We were elderly and in our twenties, lesbian, straight, female, gay, transgendered, male… The gathering might have startled some of my Sunday School bridge group of comfortably heterosexual married couples. Given the generosity demonstrated by God's creation of birds, it does not seem surprising that human variations of every sort occur and, like the birds, gather, all seeking living water.