Faith Works: Not unlike caring for birds, Bible offers a way to care for fellow humankind

If you have an eye for birds at all, you’re noticing something this time of year.

They’re flying about often with something in their mouths.

To be fair to birds, they don’t have hands. They have two feet to perch with, two wings to fly with and a beak that has to do double duty for lifting and carrying. They’re doing the best they can.

From their creation in the first chapter of the Bible, birds are all throughout scripture. They can remind us of certain passages and images, and if you’re a Bible reader, it’s interesting how often nature turns our attention to passages we can gloss over. Eagles soaring in flight, ravens feeding their young, even swallows making a home near your doorway can make you think of their comfort in the 84th psalm in the architecture of the Jerusalem Temple.

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During nesting season, there’s a commonality between the simple, humble activities of momma and papa birds and our family lives, which can make us think of our relative place in the larger context, or as Jesus says in Matthew’s 10th chapter, not a sparrow falls without God’s awareness and even a fatherly care, affirming our value at least as worthy of God’s love as those small creatures, if not even more so.

So I watch nesting birds with wonder, and sympathy, and fellow feeling. They build their homes, not with two-by-fours and 10 penny nails, but with twigs and stems and bits of vine, fluff and litter padding and filling out the developing shape.

Naturalists tell us that setting out dryer lint isn’t as helpful as we’d like to think, something I used to do. There are synthetic threads and strands of fabric which tangle differently around chicks than the normal natural materials an adult bird would gather, cutting off circulation and handicapping or even killing the young. Where I can help is to not tidy up my lawns too aggressively, leaving a bit of unkempt brush and patches of leaf debris where they can gather up the materials for nest building.

That makes me think of a parallel in Leviticus, chapter 23, where farmers in that culture are taught not to harvest all the way into the corners of the fields, so the poorest can glean sustenance from the unharvested edges. Gleaners need a place where they can find what they need, which is more important than my getting maximum value for myself of every bit of my property. Likewise the birds of the field (and the bees, a separate but related realm of nature) need me to leave them room for us to coexist in this world. There’s a wider lesson there for today’s culture, I think, but it can start with the birds.

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I see robins with mouthfuls of sticks and straw flying by; last week I saw a bald eagle on its larger, brushier, higher nest. Great blue herons are back in our area from the south and are re-occupying their rookeries, clusters of stick nests high in trees. They may not look like it, but they’re much more sociable than eagles, whose similar nests tend to exist in regal isolation. To each their own for sociability, but herons look out for each other, a practice eagles might benefit from.

Yet we each have our nature, as do the birds. We nest our own ways, and there are limits to how we can expect an eagle or a heron nature to bend to even the most practical needs of how their nest, their home, is maintained. I find myself often asking, “Why do people live that way?” Interestingly, I rarely ask myself that about birds. I take their peculiarities in stride even when they don’t make sense to me.

Consider the birds of the air: They do not sow nor reap, nor gather into barns. And yet.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s watching the birds, even if he’s not much of a birdwatcher. Tell him what they teach you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Faith Works: Birds can help teach a biblical lesson about compassion