The falcon’s call

Awed by an encounter with a bird of prey high above a Texas river, Anthony Baker ponders both the place and his place.

Anthony Baker

Anthony Baker is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. He is currently exploring the intersection of classical accounts of Christian holiness with current issues in ecology.

A view of a lightly misted valley to mountains in a desert area.

The view from the South Rim of the Big Bend National Park.

National Park Service Digital Image Archives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Seeing God in Big Bend

The scream from the sky shattered the quiet calm of my cliffside campsite. I'd never heard such a sound—it was like a large crow had decided to try and quack. I rushed out of my tent, where I'd collapsed after making the seven mile trek up the mountain, to find the source of this alarming noise.

I was up on the rim of Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, where I'd come on a solitary backpacking retreat. The "big bend" is the abrupt L-turn of the Rio Grande river, as it changes course from southeast to northeast. At the heart of the park rise the stark and severe Chisos Mountains, and the crown jewel of the Chisos is surely the South Rim. A thousand feet beneath me, a sheer drop from where I've staked my tent, there is a whole other mountain range. And ten miles away to the southeast I could see gorgeously striped limestone ridges across the river in northern Mexico.

It's a place that puts you in the presence of the sublime. Everett Townsend, the pathfinder responsible for bringing the region under the protection of Franklin Roosevelt's government, was particularly awed by this view. As a biographer put it, the view from the South Rim allowed him to

"see God as he had never seen Him before and so overpoweringly impressed him that he made note of its awesomeness…"

What does it mean, though, to see God in a place? Do I need to be up high and far away, staring into sublime depths? The South Rim gives me the impression that I'm hovering like an eagle over the earth, not standing on it like a human. Why are these the places that we think we sense the divine?

I'd like to think that seeing God in a place can be just as much about close and near attention as it is about sublime distances. What does God look and sound like here, if I stand on the ground and pay as much attention as I can to what I see and hear around me?

The Falcon's cry

I had no Internet connection on the Rim, so when I heard that bird cry out over my head I tried to burn the sound into a mental audio file. Jumping from my tent, I saw a large predator bird shooting directly above me and out over the cliff's edge. The size and shape—a large flying crossbow—told me that I'd been hailed by a peregrine falcon. A sign near my site told me that the section of the ledge where I was camping—where the South and East Rims meet—is in fact a protected nesting ground for the birds, closing to human trekkers each spring.

The peregrine is the world's fastest animal of any kind. They can dive at 200 miles per hour. That means they can only hunt birds in flight, since if they attacked anything on the ground at that speed they would both wind up, as my Granny would put it, "nothing but a greasy spot on the pavement."

A display down at the park's visitors' center had already filled me in on the near demise of the remarkable bird. DDT, a killing-machine of a pesticide that Rachel Carson called out in her book The Silent Spring in the 60s, triggers an immuno-response in female birds who have ingested it into their bodies. This response limits the calcium they can supply to their eggshells. As a result, the eggs were too vulnerable to predators or simply weather, and the embryos were not surviving.

We gave the Nobel Prize to the scientist who discovered how to use DDT to kill insects. It made so much sense, after World War II, to find ways to kill the pests who were spreading disease among the wounded soldiers and other victims of the war. But we were not yet thinking, in those days, about what else we might be killing. Now we're at least thinking, even while we're still killing.

Sin and redemption on the mountain

What does the falcon, soaring off the Rim, reveal to me about God? Consider, for instance, the doctrine of sin. Taken as an abstraction, sin is what theologians call the manifold ways that humans can turn from their holy God. But what if we fill that doctrine in with attentiveness to the story the falcon tells us? Here on the Rim, sin looks like failing to be awed enough by this remarkable life form to notice, until almost too late, that we are killing it.

Similarly, redemption, in the Christian telling of things, refers to the way that God overcomes sin and restores holy relationship. Here on the rim, redemption looks like a shared grief over the damage we've done. It looks also like the effort to protect this space as a bird sanctuary—literally a "holy place." It looks like a hope that falcon and human, like the bird and its own prey, can find a balance of mutual respect and coexistence.

The warning call of God

When I came down the mountain, I got on the Wi-Fi at the lodge outside the park and went searching for bird calls. I found a match for the sound that I'd heard - that caw-quack of a scream. It was the warning call of a peregrine falcon who has found predators in its nesting grounds. The bird was talking about me! Maybe somewhere in her DNA she recognized me as one of the DDT users that ruined her ancestors' eggshells. Hearing that call, as the bird flew off into sublime depths and distances, I suspect I was hearing about the mystery of life, the damage of sin, and the beauty of redemption. In other words, I was hearing the voice of God.

Column

Culture

Royalty

14 February 2024

4 min read

Death focuses our minds on what really matters

From ballet tales to royal soap opera, stories shed light on Lent's dark mortality.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

In the style of a Rembrandt painting Prince Harry embraces his father King Charles.

Midjourney.ai

The season of Lent – the 40 days of penitential fasting preceding the great feast of Easter – is unavoidably about death and dying. Christians try to die to sin; the season culminates with the brutal, if salvific, death of the Christ on the cross on Good Friday and it’s said that if we, as disciples, can’t die with him at Calvary, then we can’t truly know what it is to rise with him at Easter dawn.

Those of us who attend an “ashing” service at church this Ash Wednesday, will have a cross traced on our foreheads by a priest, made from the ashes of the palm crosses from last year’s Palm Sunday, with the words: “Remember that dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Reprising folk goddess Joni Mitchell, we’re thus reminded that we are but stardust and these bodies that we lug about are all bound towards that destination. In short, we’re all going to die.

So as signs of new spring life are appearing all around, the Christian Church starts to wallow in existential misery. To paraphrase the lugubrious Mona Lott (geddit?) from the wartime BBC comedy It’s that Man Again, it’s being so cheerful that keeps we Christians going.

Against this, I’d like to mount a case that there really are reasons to be cheerful in Lent; that, if the words of the ancient Gregorian chant that “in the midst of life we are in death” are true, then the reverse is also true, that in the midst of death we’re living life.

Dead, but alive again. Lost, but found. These are the qualities that ameliorate the dark mortality of Lent.

This thought comes to me partly because of the extraordinary reconciliation and peace that families often experience as they lose one of their loved number. And it comes partly having just watched a livestream of the Royal Ballet’s latest production of Manon. Our heroine dies in a New Orleans penal colony, having been exiled as a prostitute from bourgeois Paris, sustained at the end not by worldly wealth but only by the devotion of her lover.

It’s quite a story – catch it if you can. It contains the key tenet of faith during Lent, that love conquers death. Having embraced our Lenten mortality, that’s the truth we endeavour to embrace at Easter. And that, for me, begins to put the love back into Lent, which is otherwise bleak and bitter, like the sour wine offered to the dying Christ.

My case is that it takes our mortality to clock what’s really important. And we witness that human realisation all the time. I believe we’ve just seen it in Prince Harry’s transatlantic flight to visit the King on his cancer diagnosis. King Charles becomes simply a dad again when his son is presented with the reality and realisation of his mortality, that sooner or later he is going to die.

As it turns out, that reality turns out to be infinitely more important than whether he got a smaller bedroom than his big brother when they were boys (copyright Spare, Bantam Press).

It’s stories like these – from Manon to the soap opera of the modern royals – that put human mortality into bas relief, so that we can see it properly. But it’s particularly Harry’s mercy mission to his father that chimes, for me, with a gospel story, or parable as we call them.

It’s not one that’s about kings or weddings – or even principally about death and dying. I’m thinking of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Plot synopsis: A landowner has two sons. The younger one asks to cash in his inheritance and travels away to a foreign land, where he spends all he has on a debauched lifestyle (cf. the Paris from which Manon “escapes”) and is reduced to tending pigs and coveting their swill. He returns humbled to the family estate, where his father welcomes him with a feast, much to the consternation of his brother.

Sound familiar? Sure, Charles isn’t God, as we assume the forgiving father to be in the parable. Nor is Harry asking to return, humbled and repentant (though we don’t know that, do we?). Nor has he been reduced to a diet of pigswill, unless California and Netflix contracts count as that.

Possibly more accurately cast is Prince William as the elder brother, who in the parable objects to his sibling’s welcome back, pointing out that he’s done all his father’s work without such reward.

Here, for our Lenten purposes, the father’s reply is key: “My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

Dead, but alive again. Lost, but found. These are the qualities that ameliorate the dark mortality of Lent. For royals, commoners, the trafficked, the desperate and alone, it delivers the one thing that death can’t extinguish: Hope.