Bright Wings

like birds hovering

I began with a bit from Isaiah a couple of days ago, and find myself back there today, musing over this lovely metaphor: “Like birds hovering, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem . . . .” (Isa. 31:5). Those biblical birds do a lot of hovering. I looked it up: there are 128 references to birds, 30 different kinds being mentioned by name, and another 66 references to wings, though some of those are to angels’ wings, and other creatures’– metaphors in their own right. The cherubim “spread out their wings” in Exodus, “overshadowing the mercy seat.” In Deuteronomy the Lord protected Jacob “like an eagle that . . . flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions.” When Boaz blesses Ruth, he commends her to the God of Israel “under whose wings you have come to take refuge.” And the Psalmist celebrates that same source of blessing: “How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.”

I suppose those wings keep coming up in the collective imagination because we suspect we have had them—or will, in some future state—that all our flying dreams and small children’s urge to jump off walls and furniture and our drive to develop space travel reflect some truth about both our longing to reclaim the dimension of our beings not bound by this “too, too solid flesh.” (A small boy I love, having hurt his shoulder blade, once complained that his “wingbone” hurt.) But in biblical literature wings also represent protection, sheltering, shadow or shade in life-threatening heat, divine presence rending the veil of space to descend like a dove who not only alights with blessing but also, as T.S. Eliot imagines it, “breaks the air with flame of incandescent terror.” Those birds represent “a terrible beauty.”

Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins ends one of his most beloved poems with the moving assurance that “the Holy Ghost over the bent / world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings!” We use the verb “brood” so frequently now to describe a pondering, troubled, moody state of mind, it’s easy to forget that its literal meaning refers to birds protecting their eggs until they hatch. What if that’s what’s actually happening here? What if, here on this “darkling plain” among the “ignorant armies” Matthew Arnold referred to that are still busily devising ways to wreak destruction, we are actually being protected and nurtured along for whatever is next, sheltered under the wings of a great brooding being who knows our fragility and all to which we are vulnerable? There are certainly foxes outside the henhouse, and cold winds blow strong enough to snuff out whole species and a good many human hopes. But under those bright wings life keeps happening no matter how many ways of death we invent, and small hearts beat.

Our journey here takes us through the “valley of the shadow of death,” and death comes to us all when this assignment ends. But in the meantime, it may be that the shadow we walk in is not always the dark cloud of death, but protection from the heat of an unbearable Sun under the shadow of bright wings that make the light and air around us, if we look closely, incandescent.

(image courtesy of pixabay.com; free public image)