Saturday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 370

Soft grass in a forest glade

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or drink,
or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds in the sky;
they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns,
yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are not you more important than they?

I still have the binoculars and a few bird books from my birding days, and I still enjoy looking at the birds in the sky. Sometimes, when the winter remains entrenched and spring never seems to be coming, as I labor at some useless toil at this desk, I like to see in the mind's eye Canada geese honking northward. They push the winter north, drawing a linen sheet of spring behind them. Beneath them, closer to the ground, fat robins and noisy wrens flit from bush to tree, pressing northward.

"Look at the birds in the sky." It helps to do that when worries crowd out the fun of one's daily labor. Industrious as they are, they don't fret about their next meal or what they should wear. They'll sleep wherever they find themselves -- on a pond, open field or sturdy tree -- until they build their baskets of straw and leaf to nestle their young. For all they know their tribe might fall into extinction within a few years. That too is God's problem, and ours, but not theirs.

Are you not more important than they?

Saint Francis (who preached to the birds) and Saint Anthony (...to fish) heard the command of Jesus to "preach the gospel to every creature." They did it precisely by living like the birds and fish, relying wholly and entirely upon God for their provender. If they wondered where their next meal was coming from, they prayed their worries into peace of mind, and offered hunger as a form of sacrifice.

Their mendicant movement changed the course of history. Their confidence in God inspired people to support one another in that volatile region between abject poverty and obscene wealth. Eventually, that impetus would generate a revolutionary experiment -- a middle class -- with low interest loans, insurance, health care systems, representation in government, equable taxation, social security and so forth.

We call it democracy. Under that same inspiration this tentative but sturdy experiment must Look at the birds of the sky and care for their needs.

But seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness,
and all these things will be given you besides.