‘Vesper Flights’
He could have been speaking about us, Irish author, Niall Williams, poetically capturing our ancient and current plight. No matter what we do or say, we women and other marginalized people are unable to “escape the feeling that folded against (our) back” are “wings that have failed to open.”
Oh, it is not that we, as women and other-gendered, have not been able to find meaningful work and roles within our Church. But, our wings folded against our backs, we have not been sanctioned to take the highest of sacramental “vesper flights” leading to full participation in consecration, that deepest of blessing, that most magnificent form of grace given and received within our Church. Our wings have been tied, tightly.
I picked up the term “vesper flights” from an article by one of my favorite writers and naturalists, Helen MacDonald, in the August 2 New York Times Magazine. She describes in it the marvelous – one could even say miraculous – flights of swifts, those dark avian drifters and dashers darting through evening skies. She believes they have much to tell us about our collective future, and I thought she and they had much to tell us, in particular, about our possibilities as people prohibited from the highest of flights in our own Church.
You’ve probably seen swifts sweeping over ponds or lakesides or circling bell towers of churches in darkening swarms or peppering white clouds at dusk or screeching their way around barns and silos. You may have also noticed that unfailingly, each summer evening, they suddenly fall silent and ascend like devotional prayers on “vesper flights” – higher and higher until out of sight. And true flights they are, reaching heights of 6,000 feet. They return sometime in the night only to mirror the very same ascent at dawn.
As gorgeous as these images are in themselves, scientists have discovered their deeper purpose. The swifts rise to such heights to be able to sense “a flow of wind that’s unaffected by the landscape below but is determined instead by the movements of large scale weather systems.” They rise to such heights to sense convective currents, atmospheric pressures, star patterns, magnetism and polarization, more clearly. “What they are doing,” MacDonald teaches us, “is flying so high that they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next.”
Please bear with me a little more as I mention one more amazing fact about these birds: The swifts make their vesper ascensions as a flock but they actually return to earth one by one. Then, before dawn, they do the opposite, flying up singly and returning as a flock. This ensures that the knowledge they share about their world and their position in it has been gained not only by the community as a whole by each individual’s separate experience and assessment.
Helen MacDonald sees a message in this for all of us at this time, and one that can speak to the need of all people who aspire to take those flights no matter their gender. She says this of the swifts:
They aren’t always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That’s where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that will affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm.
Not all of us need to make that climb, just as many swifts eschew their vesper flights because they are occupied with eggs and young — but surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday. To take time to see the things we need to set our courses toward or against; the things we need to think about to know what we should do next. To trust in careful observation and expertise, in its sharing for the common good. When I read the news and grieve, my mind has more than once turned to vesper flights, to the strength and purpose that can arise from the collaboration of numberless frail and multitudinous souls.
Rising and returning, as an individual, as a community, let’s celebrate the “swifts” that we all are in our world and could be in our Church.
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For your consideration:
http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv16n09page24.html
Given the current social and ecological situation of our global human civilization, there can be no integral human development, and there can be no integral ecology, as long as political economy, political ecology, industrial ecology, and all other threads of human activity, remain driven by the patriarchal ideology of human supremacy over nature, which in turn derives from the delusion of male supremacy. In this regard, specifically in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, it is imperative to let go of patriarchal hierarchies rooted in misogynistic philosophies and theologies that no longer make any sense.