The Secret

Before this week's reflection, just a quick word: Many of you have written to share how much this series has meant to you. Your kind words are more than thanks enough. I treasure them. Now, a secret. I shouldn't tell you, but I just have to.

Behind my office, four serviceberry trees hang heavy with fruit. Small berries, dark purple-black, sweet enough to draw blood. For four days, the trees become the center of everything. 

Cedar waxwings arrive first. Then scarlet tanagers. Yellow warblers. More birds than gather anywhere else, anytime. They move through branches with focused joy. The whole place hums. A riot. Beautiful,  loud and uncontained.

I have five more serviceberry trees at home, on the far side of the pond. The pond sits between them. Office side, garden side, the water held between the trees like something cupped in open hands. When the birds come, they come to both sides of the pond at once.

Everything within this circle is a gift.

The serviceberry bruises if you hold it too tight. Its skin cannot contain what moves within. The juice runs. The birds don't hoard. There is too much, and it cannot be stored. Except in their bodies, their wings, and their riotous feathers.

They arrive, they receive, they move on and somewhere across the watershed, another tree gets planted from what passed through them. We never see it. We trust it.

The mystics describe the inner life of God this way: Love flows between Father and Son. Son to Spirit. Spirit circles back, spills outward. No transaction here. No measured exchange. Gift upon gift upon gift, each one overflowing the last. This abundance cannot hold itself. Cannot stay contained. It moves into creation, into history, into the particular weight of flesh. Into human life. A moment when eternity touched ground. When the gift found its way inside the circle we had drawn around ourselves

Something about that life is in my trees for four days. And we can witness it.

I should keep this to myself. Let you discover the trees. Guard the harvest. Choose who knows.

But I can’t.

Walk up quietly this week. The waxwings may let you stand among them. Pick a berry. It is sweet, and a little like a blueberry, and a little like nothing else you have tasted.

Receive it. Then, when the moment comes, pass it along.

A Prayer:

Holy Trinity, three in one and one in three: gift given before time, received before asking. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God; the circle that was never broken, the overflow that preceded containing. You held nothing back and persist outwards. What comes to us, let go through us. Through Christ, whose love grown hands and feet, still turning bread into abundance, still walks among us. For this is the pattern of love: gift. Amen.