Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye

CHAPTER 7. The Sparrow in the Mead Hall: On Birds, Souls, and the World

CHAPTER 7 The Sparrow in the Mead Hall On Birds, Souls, and the World Each new school year at my college begins with a formal convocation . The faculty march in clad in our full regalia, there is special music, an outside speaker aims to inspire us all to new heights of zeal for learning, and the first-year students are coaxed or coerced into standing up and being personally welcomed to this new intellectual adventure. It’s a good idea, no doubt, though the grouch in me always obscurely resents the pomp and circumstance. Last year this rather austere occasion was disrupted by a sparrow which somehow found its way into the auditorium. Everyone watched as it swooped and rested and sailed again in big arcs and slashes above us, wild, nervous, unpredictable, in search of an exit that its life had not prepared it to find. Once it flew right over my head, and I could feel the downdraft of its wings. A weird little thrill went through me, as if I had received some kind of tiny, natural blessing. When the bird disappeared, either settled somewhere or escaped outdoors, I sat back to listen to the speaker, somehow more at ease for our brief, tenuous moment of near contact . I even managed to listen with some care to the speaker’s concluding thoughts, which seemed memorable at the time although I do not remember them now. Humans have been fascinated by birds for thousands of years, for practical, aesthetic, and spiritual reasons. We have domesticated some, hunted others into extinction, made others 151 into symbols of feelings, ideas, and nations. We have written uncountable numbers of bad and mediocre poems about them, and a smaller number of great ones. A history of birds and the ways people have made use of them, practically or symbolically, would be an immense undertaking; here I will only consider a cluster of images and metaphors that I believe are related to my reaction to that sparrow. They have to do, simply put, with the connections between birds and souls, and the ways we use such images to envision our place in the world. Religious Images One classic image can be found in Bede’s account of the coming of the first Christian missionaries to England in the seventh century. One of King Edwin’s counselors offers this little parable: The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain , it seems justly to deserve to be followed.1 The story suggests that, like the sparrow’s brief flight through the mead hall, our lives are merely a short span of fair weather between bouts in the dark, dangerous, stormy, chaotic world beyond. The counselor emphasizes our ignorance of what comes before and after, and one can hardly discount his evocation of the eternities between which we live out our lives. Yet his interpretation of the image, powerful as it is, hardly seems inevitable or complete. That sparrow, I suspect, would be more at ease in the open, even in a winter storm, than in the complicated and confusing shelter of a room built for humans, isolated and alienated from everything 152 Scattering Point familiar to it. The sparrow I watched in Founders Hall certainly seemed eager to find its way back into an unroofed sky. Whatever quibbles we might make, the metaphor opens up much intriguing ground for further reflection. If our condition is indeed like that of a sparrow in a mead hall, who can question the counselor’s conclusion that any “certain doctrine” should be treasured ? But how far does the analogy hold, and what might happen if...