She Found Us

There is a barn swallow nesting above the door of the parish house.

I noticed her sometime last week — a mud cup pressed against the beam just above the lintel, and inside it, perfectly still, a swallow. Blending in. I stood there reverently, thankfully still. Meeting a new colleague. Was she warming eggs? Resting after a long morning's flight? Watching me watch her? I still don't know. She gave nothing away.

I told Wayne to leave her alone. He had already tried to move her once. She journeyed from one side of the doorway to the other and rebuilt. Persistent.

I am not prone to instructive performance of scripture, but this is how I delivered this instruction: I quoted Psalm 84, verse 3. Even the swallow finds a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts.

I am not sure Wayne was entirely convinced by this argument, but the nest is still there, and so is she.

We recite Psalm 84 every year on the last Sunday in October. Our St. John's Day — a feast on no calendar, except the deep calendar of the turning leaf. We have been saying those words about the swallow for years — at your altars, at your altars — and all that time I think we half-imagined it as poetry, as the psalmist's longing for a belonging so complete that even the birds find it. A beautiful idea. A metaphor for homecoming.

And then she built her nest above our door.

I don't know what to do with the fact that she arrived without being invited, without knowing the psalm, without any awareness of what her presence means to the people walking beneath her. She is simply doing what barn swallows do in June: finding a sheltered place, pressing mud into a cup, settling in. She is not performing anything. She is not illustrating a point. She is nesting at our altars because this is where she decided to nest, and the psalm has been waiting twenty-eight centuries to say yes, exactly, that is what I meant.

She is our companion. Going about her life alongside ours. Living her prayers above the door we walk through every day, watching and resting and warming what she carries. And in her hiddenness more present than if she announced herself.

The psalmist knew something we keep having to learn: that God's house is large enough for creatures who don't know they're in it.

A Prayer

Gracious God, you prepared a place for the swallow before we knew to look for her, and she found it. Teach us the faith that does not announce itself — the quiet, hidden, load-bearing trust of a creature settled into your care. May we recognize your house by who else has made a home there. Through Christ, in whom all things hold together and all creatures find their rest. Amen.