The Eye

by Angela Townsend

I look at the sparrow’s eye and see my own.

This is not because my father called me Little Sparrow, although it was as accurate a name as I’ve ever been given. I am small and frenetic, breakable and common, song and sticks and soil and sensitivity.

It’s because the almond pool of tea looks so much like mine, liquid alertness, skywatching at all times.

There was a time when I shoved away the sisterhood of the sparrow. I mounted the steed of certainty, trotting into the fortress. The stones were tightly joined. The keep was well kept, the better to guard against the slippery slope.

Best to patrol the flatlands, where you can see a thousand answers in all directions. The horizon is submissive. Invasions are rare.

When a dangerous person like St. Francis of Assisi does his jig on the outskirts, you card him for pantheism. What is this talk of Brother Sun and Sister Moon?

What are the risks of being built from sparrow dust? Confident voices would tell me.

If we came from sparrows and salamanders, everything holy was a lie. If every mystery wasn’t textbook history, we had no future. Shake hands with evolution, and you lose Jesus. One loose stone could topple the tower. Splash about with myth and poetry, and you’re playing theological Jenga.

We are the crown of creation, and trembling creatures serve us.

God’s eye may be on the sparrow, but we are no sparrows. We have strong bones.

The birds and cats and tulips and turnips are accessories in our dollhouse.

It is a docile dollhouse.

But dangerous lives are drawn to play. St. Francis and Jesus and my scampish friends kept showing up with sloppy things like stories and songs, meteor showers and electrons.

Language, my lover, kept removing the roof, lowering me gently into the library. Could it be that holy history has infinite accents, all of them honest? Might seraphs splash in the deep end of our understanding, and invite us in?

Was I paralyzed with worry about protecting God?

Sparrows landed on my shoulders.

Some of them came from the fourth century, feathery Augustines and Cappadocians. These cornerstones were more colorful than I bargained for, marbled with quartzy wild. They read Genesis with birds’ eyes, aloft in allegory, branching boldly into myth.

These were reliable birds, but here they were, tossing my tight, twentieth century Tetris of truths.

Others streaked medieval skies. How could they hold my truths so lightly? Sainted persons read a bigger book than mine, broad and bawdy enough to see genres where I read only the generic. If allegory was wide enough for square-dancing monks, was there a nest for me?

There were modern sparrows and unauthorized cockatoos.

They lobbed my literalism back at me. To read poetry like the evening news is to plug your ears with pap. Far better to gather birdseed and mustard seeds. Far better to take truth on its stormy terms.

My brain flapped breathlessly. Truth has colors and hills.

It was true: God loves creating, and God gave us genres and secret passageways and treasure hunts. There is straightforward history and playful splashing, allegory and exultation, subtlety and cornerstones.

The single genre of “textbook” is too small.

Poetry is permitted.

Genesis gives us truth that language cannot carry, straining syntax to sing with the first stars.

We are birdstuff and stardust, evolution’s holy revolution, safe in lush language. We are the apple of God’s eye, but His eye is on the sparrow, too.

We are too small for the fortress and too wild for the flatlands.

These hilly days, I find myself disorganized and dazzled. I believe that Jesus lived and died and rose and reigns, as literally as I fed the cats this morning. He is Yes and Amen from Genesis to Revelation, the answer to the one question:

Will we be loved unconditionally, forever?

I am weightless and unworried, a brown bird on the breath of Spirit. The land is not flat. The house is not for dolls. Whales swallow prophets, and lonely owls write psalms, and hollow-boned beasts evolve into image-bearers.

I look the sparrow in the eye, and we sing.

* * * * *

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and B.A. from Vassar College. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, makes sure to laugh with her mother every morning, and delights in the moon. Her work appears in Braided Way, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, LEON Literary Review, and The Razor, among others. Angie loves life dearly.