I cannot save a dead bird.
It is not dead yet. But I am pretty sure it is dying, pretty sure it has been sick for a long time. Recently I had noticed my cats spending more hours than usual staring out the downstairs window. When I followed their fixed gaze, I saw a sparrow: standing, still, unmoving on our porch.
Whenever I opened a door, so much as got near, it half-flew half-crashed away into the bushes near the house. I had assumed the bird to be a window strike, maybe. But today, when I was putting the porch flowerbeds away, I found what I think is the same bird: huddled into the corner of one, barely moving.
I did what I know you are supposed to do. I put a handful of seed into the flowerbed, pulled a towel partially over the top so he could feel sheltered and not afraid. And then I left the little sparrow there, to God’s will and to nature. We have no wildlife rehabilitators, no vets who will come out for a single sparrow. Its life is small, and this one’s life will likely be shorter than most.
I cannot save a dead bird.
Nor can anyone else. I thought about that, going inside, how powerless we really are. We cannot bring a dead bird back to life, for all our science, for all our efforts and education, for all our good will and intent. We cannot bring people back to life. We can fight cancer and detect it, can sometimes even cure it, but we cannot unmake it. We cannot stop a war. We cannot stop people dying in the wars.
This is the great hopelessness, isn’t it? The great despair.
And our answers for this darkness are so thin, as desperate as we are for them. I read recently about a billionaire whose life and energy and significant financial resources are devoted to “longevity.” To living as long and as well as possible. To put off what will be inevitable.
This is what we do, to degrees of varying scale. We try to postpone it. We try to mend it. We try to prevent or detect it. We try to dialogue it. We try to word our way through it. But the wars continue and sparrows still fall sick and die and so do we.
There are some schools of thought that try to capture this as the great triumph of humanity. Yes, we’re short-lived, but we make our own choices, these schools say. We self-actualize. We empower ourselves in this brief span to make meaning of our own lives.
But somehow, those rousing tributes to the human spirit wither and fall short in the face of the sheer wrongness that is death, the despair it brings: innocent victims of war and terror, innocent animals, innocent children, those who should have had better or longer or more.
I cannot save a dead bird.
But even if I could—even if we could—it would not change that creeping darkness. Because even if I waved my hand over the flowerbed and said, “Live!” and the sparrow hopped up—up and around, flew off hale and whole—it would still have been sick, would still have suffered. The wrongness would still exist, the sickness and suffering exist.
It’s not enough to merely undo.
When my mother was first diagnosed with cancer, she went through chemotherapy and treatment and eventually the cancer was declared to be absent in her body. Though it would later return, we claimed that absence at the time as a victory. The cancer had left her: the disease in her body had been successfully vanquished.
But the struggle and the sickness left a mark on her: a deep-seated exhaustion, a traumatic memory, a brain fog that descended from time to time. The cancer had been eradicated but its memory had not, and the suffering it spawned had not. Even if we learn how to undo, we cannot unmake. We cannot redeem.
This is one of many reasons I am a believer.
I refuse to accept this world. Sometimes, I hate ithe way it is, and I believe God hates it, too. I hate that sparrows get sick and die in my porch flowerbeds. I hate that my mother suffered and died from cancer. I hate watching the news, seeing mourning families and corpses shrouded in stacks. I hate seeing people hurt and hurt and hurt.
It’s not enough to just undo it.
“The whole head is sick,” says Isaiah 1:5. “And the whole heart is faint and sick.” Sick to the core, diseased to the bone, collapsing, dying. It’s not enough to halt the corruption and reverse it. Everything has to be made new. Not just cured, not just undone, but somehow mysteriously transformed into what it should always have been and was always meant to be.
Advent is coming, a friend of mine reminded me. She is a minister; she is also a work colleague who at the end of last week was as exhausted and as tired as I was. As we finished our last meeting of the week, recapping what needed to be done for next, she paused, glanced up. “Advent is coming, though. Advent is coming.”
“It is,” I said. “And thank God.”
Advent will arrive. Advent is The Arrival. And it is a good reminder, in a world where I cannot save dead birds, that help is on the way. Hope is on the way.
It is already here.
It is already saving us with the promise of what redemption means.
I cannot save dead birds. But God can redeem them. God will redeem all of it.
Samaritan's Song 