No. 012: This Kingdom Is for the Birds.

On suburban birdsongs and the art of familiarity; and a feasible call to action for American Evangelicals.

Mornings are predictable. Around the time I’m sipping the dregs of my second cup of coffee, the animated steps of a seven-year-old tumble down the stairs, and I already know the words that will follow as soon as he hits the bottom: “Mom! Please, can I do a bird walk?”

“Yep,” I agree, unlocking and handing over my phone, before he sprints out the door to the front yard. Eleven minutes later, he returns, bearing his report, “Fifteen birds, and even a rare one!”

Two years ago, I sat on the back porch of my grandparents’ farmhouse in southwest Georgia, watching a bird—which looked like a mourning dove except for the dark stripe crossing the nape of its neck—peck at the ground for whatever seeds the songbirds had dropped from the feeder above. Curious about our mystery bird, my uncle opened an app on his phone, which he claimed could identify the bird simply by listening to its muffled coos. I was skeptical, but within thirty seconds of starting the recording, we had our answer: Eurasian collared dove.

A few months later, early in the spring, I awoke one night a little after midnight. My heart tumbled with whatever was then its anxiety du jour, and I couldn’t fall back asleep. The next few, dark hours were lonely, and they passed slowly.

Since the new warmth of spring whispered in the air, we had cracked open our windows for the night. The forlorn silence of the wee hours had only added to my restless angst, but eventually, still an hour before the sun peek-a-booed through the trees, new sounds breezed through the windows: birdsongs—first one, then another, and soon, a whole, happy host. Where I had earlier felt isolated in my insomnia, the bright voices of the birds now hit like warm, neighborly greetings: “You are not alone, and the darkness is not so permanent as it seems.”

I was grateful for the precious new friends who had interrupted my darkness with hope, and now I wanted to get to know them. It was then that my uncle’s smartphone app came to mind. I downloaded the app, slipped on my muck boots, and stepped out into the yard, as gentle, pink light tiptoed over the eastern tree line.

Our family had by then lived in that house for five years, so I thought I knew approximately what to expect. The results, however, surprised me with more than a few species I’d never before heard of, much less known to be my neighbors. The voice I recognized as the one that had first broken my silent night turned out to be a northern flicker, and the second, a great crested flycatcher. Pleased to make your acquaintance!, I smiled.

When the rest of my family finally awoke, I was eager to share my discoveries. My sons were delighted, and they pleaded to charter my phone for “bird walks” of their own. Almost immediately, bird-walking became a favorite hobby of my sons, and it is one that has now held their attention for a year and a half.

Several months ago, our family moved from Louisville, Kentucky, where we’d lived the previous eight years, to the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, where I was born and raised. Georgia feels like home to me. It’s where my heart knows itself to belong, and I was excited when we decided to move our family here. Our season in Louisville was a sweet one, though, and there were many things I grieved to leave behind.

One of those things, admittedly, was the promise of exhilarating bird walks. Our old house in Louisville was on the outskirts of town—one of the first roads of “rural” after the last stretch “suburban.” It was perched atop a steep hill surrounded by woods, and along the base of the hill ran a quiet creek. If the results of my first bird walk that early spring morning had surprised me, the many bird walks that followed introduced our family to an even greater diversity of charming avian neighbors: tanagers and buntings, grosbeaks and larks, thrushes and vireos. Once, I kid you not, we looked out the window to see a regal sandhill crane marching across the grass.

Of course, there are birds in Atlanta too, but the ones I could remember from my childhood backyard were a little less exceptional and considerably less diverse: cardinals, jays, wrens, sparrows—perhaps an American goldfinch or eastern bluebird if you were lucky. I fully expected that within two weeks of moving here, my sons would get bored and leave their bird-walking days behind.

To my delight, the boys not only have maintained the habit with enthusiasm—they have also almost daily returned from their walks with songs on record for birds that I, when I was growing up here, never knew to be around: eastern towhees and phoebes, yellow-rumped warblers, ruby-crowned kinglets, and more. On multiple occasions they have even picked up the song of my favorite bird, the elusive cedar waxwing. If we hadn’t made the effort to pay attention, my appreciation for the biodiversity of our little, suburban street never would have taken root.

My pleasant surprise around our suburban birdsongs reminds me of one of my many favorite quotes from my favorite author—who, if you know me at any level past the surface, you already know to be Wendell Berry. According to Berry,

The real infinitude of experience is familiarity. My own experience has shown me that it is possible to live in and attentively study the same small place decade after decade, and find that it ceaselessly evades and exceeds comprehension. There is nothing that it can be reduced to, because “it” is always, and not predictably, changing. … Living and working in the place day by day, one is continuously revising one’s knowledge of it, continuously being surprised by it and in error about it. … One knows one’s place, that is to say, only within limits, and its limits are in one’s mind, not in the place. This is a description of life in time in the world. A place, apart from our now always possible destruction of it, is inexhaustible. It cannot be altogether known, seen, understood, or appreciated.¹

Berry has gained a substantial audience among many, and perhaps especially among Evangelical Millennials with proclivities toward the humanities. Although a ninety-year-old farmer from rural Kentucky may seem an unlikely candidate for such popularity among a younger generation, on second look it’s not hard to ascertain the reason.

Our generation has witnessed the collateral damage of the unconstrained “innovation” promoted by our greed-driven, consumerist economy, which some Evangelicals go so far as to imagine as part and parcel of God’s kingdom economy. We grieve the blatant hypocrisy of Evangelicals in positions of power who have hyper-spiritualized the gospel into a message of moralistic, therapeutic theism, meant to validate their comfort and power, at the expense of compassion, self-sacrifice, and stewardship. We are disillusioned with the strain of Evangelicalism that neglects to follow Christ on a high road of cruciform grace and truth, fixating instead on the impossible trolley problems presented by partisan politics.

It is for these reasons and more that Berry’s messages of economic propriety, comprehensive community, and reverence for the ordinary have captured our attention. In an age that oscillates between anxious sound bytes and sentimental platitudes, Berry’s words give us sure footing on a path that is as tangible as it is constructive. His vision of “the good life” transcends the wisdom of the day to offer a new picture of strength—one that appraises humility as its noblest asset, rather than as a liability.

There is, however, a way in which many of us, myself included, may be tempted to misappropriate Berry’s line of argument. Berry’s writing, of course, bears the marks of his rural setting, and the bucolic aesthetic of both his poetry and prose easily stirs in us longings for a romanticized picture of rural life. As a result, we are tempted to understand rurality as essential to Berry’s calls to pursue affectionate familiarity, and we may easily grow in resentment for the realities of the suburban or urban contexts in which we actually live. We suppose that we would be in a far better position to pursue the good life and to remain curious about our environments if only we were surrounded by sycamore groves instead of strip malls, red foxes instead of Amazon boxes, and “good ol’ country folk” instead of either hooligans in beat-up Malibus or soccer moms in stuck-up Mercedes.

The mental shift may feel subtle, but when we romanticize the rural as an excuse to begrudge our reality—loving a “natural” aesthetic for the sake of its obvious loveliness rather than pursuing familiarity with our environment in all of its uncomfortable complexity—we are committing the exact error that Berry urges us to avoid. That is, we are looking to our environments so that they may give us something—pleasure, peace, or any other brand of enjoyment—rather than so that we can understand their needs and then show up with humility to serve them. We are dreaming of a utopia cordoned off for our own delight.

When I was a teenager in Atlanta, I lived in an affluent area, had generally affluent friends, and attended an affluent church. Equipped with a drivers license and the keys to a car that would take me wherever I wanted to go, I will admit that I often made a concentrated effort to stick to environments that I considered charming and comfortable. I would gladly drive an extra few minutes in order to pass through the scenic route of nice houses rather than taking the main roads past old, utilitarian storefronts, gas stations, and apartment complexes. Frankly, I resented the ugly parts of town for “bringing down the neighborhood.”

Since moving back, though, I have returned with a new curiosity to explore parts of town on which I used to look down. As it turns out, even more than I have been surprised by the beautiful diversity of birds in my Atlanta backyard, I have been surprised to find beauty here in places and in people I used view with suspicion or contempt. I love my city more than I used to, because I love it for what it actually is rather than for what I wish it could be for the sake of my own pleasure, and I love it with a desire to see all its inhabitants flourish.

Familiarity, when married to self-promotion, may breed resentment; but when married to humble attention, it breeds affection and care.

---

I could stop the essay there, but to be candid, what inspired me to write this piece in the first place was my personal prayer for American Evangelicals as we enter a contentious election week.

If I could wish anything for us, moving forward, it would be this: humble attention to and affectionate familiarity with our “neighborhood” of America.

I want us to be curious about our neighbors (all of them)—about their life stories and about the environments that they call home. I want us to be just as motivated to learn as we are to preach.

American Evangelicals talk a lot about “standing for the truth.” And that’s cool. I wouldn’t want anything less for us.

But to be a disciple (from the Latin discupulus, lit. “follower”) of Christ requires that we do more than stand; it requires that we walk, just as Jesus did, in a real time, in a real place, and among real people. Standing for the truth is part of our mission. But we will only be able to do this part of our mission well if we are also habitually walking our environs with humble attention and engaging our neighbors with affectionate familiarity.

I will be the first to admit that following Jesus on foot, looking outward into a broken and often ugly world, isn’t easy. It takes you down uncomfortable paths. It’s likely to get your feet dirty.

It’s easier to rest our attention on ourselves and on our personal comfort.

It’s easier to tune out the brokenness we see around us, and instead to tune into media pundits and, sadly, sometimes even pastors who profit off us by patting us on our backs for being smart enough to join the ranks of “good guys” and by demonizing those “bad guys” over there—validating our pride and self-preservation.

It’s easier to cast a quick vote for whichever political candidate we consider most adequate to solve the problems around us, then wash our hands of the issues and go back to our own personal missions of self-gratification.

We grant, of course, that Jesus went out of his way to share meals and conversations with the sinners of his current day. But when we read these accounts from the Gospels, I wonder how often we romanticize them too, just as we do with Berry. I wonder whether we imagine the prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners of Jesus’ day as semblances of a scruffy but endearing Oliver Twist, precious hands outstretched—“please, sir, I want some more!”

If the sinners of our day were more like this and not so “lazy” and “tacky” and “idiotic” and “entitled” and “criminal” as the ones of our day, then of course we would treat them graciously—but surely Jesus doesn’t expect us to extend compassionate grace to these sinners we see on TV, who so clearly don’t deserve it?

If we read the Gospel accounts in this light, we are grossly misreading biblical history, and we are also grossly missing the point: Jesus came to save sinners. He came to save bad guys. He came to save the lazy, the tacky, the idiotic, the entitled, and the criminal. He came to save those who deserved nothing but death.

From start to finish, the earthly ministry of Jesus was one of humble attention to and affectionate familiarity with those whom the (conservative) religious establishment of his day had condemned as lost causes, as pests, and as enemies. Where the virtuous elite had left them for damned, the Incarnate Son of God condescended to them, listened to them, and cared for them.

Did Jesus “stand for the truth” and call sinners to repentance? Of course. But he did not deliver his calls to repentance primarily as condemnations; he delivered them as benevolent invitations to men and women whom he knew to be lost and hurting and helpless. Why? Because these men and women were created in his own image. Every one of them bore inherent, indestructible dignity, and Christ desired their restoration. Jesus loved sinners. Jesus loves sinners. And he bids his followers to do the same.

As long as we are abiding in Christ, we need not fear that by associating ourselves with sinners we will soften in our convictions. It certainly didn’t work that way for Jesus, and it doesn’t have to work that way for us. However, humble attention and affectionate familiarity will chip away at our pride, making room for Christ-like compassion to take the reins of our lives.

If you are an American Evangelical, I fervently implore you to familiarize yourself with the stories of those whom our own establishment has demonized. Seek these stories not from the sources that profit off your fear, pride, and greed; seek them from sources as close to the first-person accounts as possible. When you can, seek opportunities to get to know real people via face-to-face relationships.

If you don’t know where to start, I invite you to start with me. I have been a committed believer for as long as I can remember. I have two degrees in biblical studies from an Evangelical college. I desire to honor and obey Christ. But during seasons of mental and emotional desperation, I have done things that I never would have imagined I could—at least not during seasons of stability and normalcy. I have treated the embodied life God gave me to steward as worse than trash. I have said and done horrible things to the people I love most and who most love me. I won’t be gratuitous with the details, but I also won’t beat around the bush: I have sinned in catastrophic ways.

For those of us who have lived most of our lives in relative comfort and stability, we cannot fathom that we would ever resort to the crimes and sins of those whom we see as monsters. But you might be surprised how easily you too become a monster when you are truly desperate—what you would do for the tiniest sliver of relief, the closest thing you think you’ll ever get to mercy. I know I was.

I’ll say it again: nothing I’ve written above bears the goal either to make light of or to excuse sin—neither my own nor anyone else’s.

To the contrary, the real goal is fourfold:

First, when we get to know sinners—when we hear their stories of pain and of desperation, and when we witness firsthand their inherent dignity—we will learn to understand them as people who are very much like us, which will grow us in affection and Christ-like compassion.

Second, we will learn to understand ourselves as people who are very much like them—people who probably aren’t nearly as squeaky-clean as we might like to think we are, and whose own sin could easily bubble to the surface under dire circumstances. (Fellow parents—if you’re anything like me, perhaps you’ve said and done things you’re not proud of simply when faced with the “desperation” of trying to wrangle your kids into the minivan.) This recognition is freeing: it rids us of our savior complex and empowers us to rejoice at new heights in the grace that our true Savior, Christ, has shown us.

Third, we will learn that the viral mic-drops of our charismatic pundits almost always are “defeats” only of straw-man arguments. Our “idiotic enemies” often are significantly more reasonable, more thoughtful, more sincere, and more virtue-driven than we give them credit for, and we only humiliate ourselves when we fail to engage them with respect and dignity.

Finally, the affection and care produced by our familiarity will motivate us to put in the work to be part of the solution. Rather than supposing it’s enough simply to vote for the “right candidate” who glibly promises to stamp out the symptoms of desperation, we are compelled to mobilize our personal lives and our local churches to meet people and to serve people in the root causes of their desperation.

My argument here is not a political one. My argument is for Christians whose primary allegiance is the kingdom of Christ and who are looking for this kingdom to unfold not through the work of a politician, but through the work of the church. If the candidate you voted for wins? Okay. If the candidate you voted for loses? Okay. If you couldn’t in good conscience vote at all? Okay. No matter the result, the mission we have on Wednesday will be no different than the mission we have today:

Wake up, and pay attention. (Listen to the birds while you’re at it.)

Roll up your sleeves, and love your neighbor.

And wait expectantly for the coming of your King.

Maranatha.

1. Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Counterpoint, 2000) 139.