Living in the North East of Scotland the sight and sound of migrating geese is a regular experience of nature at its most beautiful, haunting and heart lifting. A mile or two beyond where I live is Loch Skene, one of the most important staging posts for migration and a place where thousands of geese winter before heading North again.
What is it, though, about the sight and sound of those voyagers from the North that unfailingly lifts the affections towards hopefulness and renewal of spirits? Flying in formation, honking their perseverance, hundreds of ink marks flowing on a blue sky, at times strung together in chevrons drawn with a care for geometry, they proclaim both freedom and discipline.
A flock of geese takes off in an apparent chaos, and almost immediately, without a conductor, orchestrate their movements into the most economical dynamics for birds their size and weight. Survival is by cooperation; shared workload prevents exhaustion; and somewhere inside those aerodynamic heads, a compass more accurate than most human technologies. Geese in migration intimate a change of season, they announce that life doesn't stay the same, they demonstrate that travel and the journey are as important in life as routine and a stability that can easily become stuckness.
Late on this February afternoon, while engaged in the routines of making life work, a thousand geese passed overhead, give or take a few. I'd spent much of the day in a reflective and lowered mood, for various reasons. Part of it the continuing work of grieving and rebuilding in a time of loss.
Sometimes stuckness isn't what you seek, it's what happens, routines are safe, change requires energy, imagination and the strength to take off and fly. Then this happens to pull you out of your own head; a thousand geese haul you out of your own head, lift up your heart, and force you to look at the world less unseeingly. Or to put it more positively, those aviators from elsewhere, now heading somewhere else, have seduced you into seeing the world again in its rawness, its beauty, its unending possibilities, and it sheer magnificence as a place to be alive.
Being a Christian is itself a way of seeing the world, a worldview. And amongst the more stringent demands of trying to live the life of faith is to hold on to the view that this world is God-loved, because God-created. We will all have our moments of revelation, epiphany, those gifts in time when we become aware of our belonging on earth, and of our longing for more than we can say. Those overhead and overheard geese, honking their encouragement to each other, compel us to look beyond where we are, creating that strange feeling of contentment that is hard to distinguish from a form of discontent that urges us outward, upward, forward.
Contentment cannot be permanent; there comes a time to move, change, and trust to the power of the One who calls us to newness, and out of the routine, the familiar, the comfortable and if we are honest, the stuckness of life that has settled for what it already has. I think the birth of such trust is called hope, and it is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Standing in a car park, looking at the sky, watching geese on the move, hearing their wild cries, somewhere inside bolts click back and doors open, curtains are pulled back and light spills inward, and God has spoken through the ancient migratory patterns of creatures who know their way home.
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