This month, an additional Moon Prize, the 123rd, goes to Angela Townsend's magical prose piece "The
Eye."
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.
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