The Funerary Jay

a devotional for summer

Photo by Jay Heike on Unsplash

Thank you for joining us! Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

Last week we focused on the metaphor of pruning, and how it affects our spiritual and emotional health. On our devotional, A Gracious Pruning, TBollen commented:

“I am drawn to the metaphor of pruning -- having been both pruner and prunee. :-) How many times has the Lord removed something from me that I was convinced I had to hold onto? And how many times have I realized later that He was right and I was responding in my usual human way, shortsighted, self-protective, and self-focused? "[E]very branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." John 15:2b”

Love this, TBollen! Very profoundly put. Thank you so much for commenting!

If you want to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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I'm sorry,
I whispered
as I pulled the blue feathered body
from the water;

like an investigator
I examined the scene:

the water
in the bucket
at the side of our woodshed
was too shallow,

so the perching jay
meaning to drink
(gray feathers; a foolish fledgling)
had fallen in
and been unable to get out;

I'm sorry,
I whispered
as I laid the bird to rest

in a corner of the woods
where my curious dog would not go,

surrounded by the grace of ferns
and the quiet of summer,
on a bed of tree roots 
like the arms
of God.

It would be wrong for me to present a picture-perfect idea of our lives on these five wooded acres. We sometimes sit front-row to death in various forms, an uncomfortable companion.

(Our devotional may start out a bit sad today. But I promise you, there’s a hopeful end.)

When we lived city-adjacent in neighborhoods and suburbs, death was usually the aftermath of an occasional bird, rodent, or possum struck by a car. Tragic, yet infrequent. Nothing we had to face daily.

Here, we are more aware of Creation’s cycles. The scream of a rabbit in the early morning dark. A scattering of feathers, the only evidence of a meal enjoyed. Birds of prey circling overhead, their keen eyes watchful. Even in our garden we watch our seeds sprout, grow, and then wither. It is the way of things.

But it is harder to take when we are somehow at fault.

Though my husband and I are both comfortable with the occasional hunt for our food (fishing and small game, mostly), neither of us has any patience for cruelty or waste. So when my dog approached the bucket at the side of our woodshed with some cautious curiosity one summer morning, and I found the young Steller’s Jay drowned within, it grieved me.

My grief was layered. Mostly, I grieved because it was my fault. The wildlife frequently uses that bucket to drink from, and I try to keep it topped up so that it’s easier to clamber out of if someone were to fall in. I was negligent in that responsibility.

But my grief rippled outward to the ways we affect the world around us on a massive scale. The bucket is not a natural place to drink. The animals and birds simply make do with a human landscape, and we accommodate where we can. Our neighbors feed the birds, the raccoons, and every creature that makes their way through the yard, no matter how much it tames them. The bears wander closer to our fences, pushed onward by the “progress” of development companies.

I don’t mean to tell you a sad story on a Monday morning. Instead, I mean to challenge us all, myself included, and perhaps offer some encouragement presented backwards.

The young jay that I found that morning was known by God. Every feather accounted for, every heartbeat. It was known. And how much more am I known by the God who surrounds me, every day?

And instead of giving me a sense of superiority over the creatures around me, this thought humbles me. Me and that jay? Me and every jay that comes to visit, a squawking sapphire blur in the hemlock trees? We are all beloved by God, an incarnational God who still rides the wind of this world He made.

When I grieve the jay, I grieve this temporary place where death is. But the shine and shiver of blue in the treetops tell the story of a grace—and an undying world—Yet To Come.

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