Warblers, the Woods, and Wisdom's Song

Learning to hear the call of wisdom in the rhythms of creation | The Word in the Wild, Proper 19, Year B

Proverbs 1:20-33

Mark 8:27-38

Photo by Raju Bhupatiraju on Unsplash

We woke to the sound of whip-poor-wills, the rain fly off and stars visible above the mosquito screen. As the valley sky began to grow with light, we roused and stepped out into the cool air of the season’s first cold front. I made coffee, distributed muffins, lit a fire, and waited anxiously for my chance to step away and walk the creekside trail behind our campsite. This is warbler season and migrants were coming through. I’d seen reports of Canada Warblers in particular on the birding sites I frequent. It had been a while since I’d seen one and I was hoping that here, in Ouachita Mountains, I’d have a chance.

The path, following an old logging road, cut along a hillside with a spring fed creek below. It’s a place my family likes to go in the summer, with cool deep pools where we can get a respite from the heavy humid days of July and August. Now that fall is arriving, day by scattered day, we try to go camping as much as we can—a chance to enter a different rhythm.

Sunrise and sunset, the quieting of song birds turning to the trills of screech owls, the gathering of wood, the tending of the fire, and cooking of meals—when we camp our patterns of life seem to conform to something simpler, more basic, perhaps more human. People have been living according to these rhythms in the midst of the wider cycles of growth and dormancy, arrival and migration for as long as our species has existed. This is in contrast to our normal day to day lives in the Industrial world, dictated by activity, fueled by conveniences. As I write, in the unairconditioned space of my shed, listening to the coo of a mourning dove, I also hear alongside it the roar of the interstate, the whirring blades of a helicopter traveling to the hospital nearby. And of course, here I am, caught in this networked web, writing on a computer.

As I walked along the trail, I thought about Wisdom and her call. I’d read the scriptures for this coming Sunday, and I was letting them meander through my mind as I wandered, listening and watching for warblers. In the woods, I could hear those echoes of Proverbs that speak to Wisdom’s place in the whole of creation. At one point in the book, she is allowed to speak in her own voice, recounting how she was among the first of God’s creatures:

“The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of long ago...” (8:22)

Wisdom goes on to say that she was with God as all things were created and that Wisdom herself was an agent of God’s work:

“I was beside him, like a master

worker;

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always…” (8:30)

I came to a group of small birds—Chickadees, Titmice, Pine Warblers—all year-around residents of these woods. Mixed among them were some migrants—a Hooded Warbler, a Black-throated Green Warbler, and an American Redstart. Watching these creatures as they foraged, picking caterpillars from the leaves, and berries from the vines of Virginia Creeper and Racoon-grapes, I could sense the presence of Wisdom in this world—the guiding patterns of goodness that sings at the depths of the given places of creation.

I could see her presence in the berries and nuts that were in abundance everywhere I turned. The ground was littered with Black Walnuts, and a wide range of shrubs and vines were laden with ripe berries. These fruits are timed, in a beautiful dance, with the migration of birds that use them to fuel their long-distance flights. For the resident species, the seeds and nuts also serve as a winter cache. Now is the time chickadees are stuffing seeds into crevices of bark all over the woods. A store that they will recover, drawing on their incredible memory, when food proves scarce in the heart of winter.

In the selection of Proverbs we have for this Sunday we do not find this wild Wisdom delighting with God in the creation of the world. Instead, we find her in the streets, crying out over the din of noise so that she might be heard, hoarse with yelling:

“Wisdom cries out in the street;

in the squares she raises her voice.

at the busiest corner she cries out;

at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:

‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?’”

Or, as the Common English Bible translates that last line:

“How long will you clueless people

love your naivete..”

Think of the world of commerce and entertainment, the global trade of vapid junk. Take a store like Five Below, a wasteland of cheap products that break almost as soon as they are purchased. What kind of society invests in such a store, putting it in a portfolio on which to stake a retirement? Today its stock is up, but when it falls I will join Wendell Berry in saying, “long live gravity.” Think of the forests that had to be destroyed for the paper that will go in the trash in a week or month; think of the petroleum pumped and metal mined, all to end up in a landfill because the products made from them are crafted with the most careless work possible. As Wendell Berry once wrote, “We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue. We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other.”

Berry, you, me—we are all among the crowd at the street corner, listening to wisdom’s call. The task that the writer of Proverbs is calling us toward, is to follow people like Berry, and so many saints through history, in heeding that call and beginning the long and painful work of conversion—stepping out of the foolish chaos of the world and learning to live into the rhythms of God’s givenness.

It is that same task that Jesus has in mind when he tells his disciples: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

The cross is an instrument through which our attachments to the unraveling patterns of the world can be broken. To take it up is to walk toward what we know will be our death to those patterns. But on the other side is resurrection, a new life occupying the reality of God’s ways and wisdom.

Eventually the creek-side trail descended and disappeared, the old rode trace overgrown from lack of use. The road was a scar, evidence of the exploitation of these woods some decades ago. But now, they are growing full of mature hardwoods, resurrecting from their one time destruction.

I’d been gone long enough, so I turned around and headed back to camp. On my way, I encountered another band of birds, and this time I caught sight of a Canada Warbler, its back a crisp gray, its chest a deep yellow with a necklace of black bands. It was a joy to catch sight of such a bird in this one moment of a life that is so other and outside my own. As I heard the voices of my daughters as they played and met my bounding dog on the trail, my heart was filled with the gladness that comes in returning to the deeper music that wisdom sings, a song always calling us to the common dance of life if we will only listen.