Father Tokarz on Bird Watching
Last year my sister, Marge, gave me a present last year about now that was perfectly timed: I’d just put up a bird feeder, and it was a book titled Birds of Alabama. It was a great gift for a number of reasons.
You might think the first of these would be that it would give me information. Lord knows, the book supplied me with that! But that wasn’t the most important thing it gave me. It taught me to look rather than to (more or less) see.
By truly looking, I noticed things I’d never noticed before. What I’d taken for sparrows turned out to be house finches: lovely, almost always in pairs, and streaked with red. What I had “dismissed” as a baby blue jay turned out to be a tufted titmouse–animated, alive, YOUNG in the most joyful sense of the word. What I’d thought was another starling was in fact a thrasher. And I saw birds I’d never noticed before appeared: birds like eastern towhees, or kill-deer (complete with their babies). It has been a joy of discovery, but only of discovery of what had always been there. It was not my world that changed, only my eyes.
And that’s the point. How do we see? I give a talk on retreats sometimes called “The 3 Glances of Christ.” And I always say the title is wrong: Christ never “glanced”–He always “gazed.” He always made an invitation to an encounter with the other person, always was open to drawing the other person into relationship with Him. Whether or not the other person accepted this invitation is another question; the invitation was always there (think of Zacchaeus in the tree in Luke 19:5, or the leper in Mark 1:41, or the rich young man in Mark 10:21, or the two disciples of John the Baptist who followed Jesus in John 1:38).
He gazes at us, too–with knowledge of our hearts and its desires. The Little Prince reminds us, “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” He gazes at us because He wants truly to know (= love) us.
And He tells us to look for Him in the poor: the hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, ill, homeless.
Will we choose to see “with the heart”? Will we choose to see “what is essential”? Will we return His gaze?
I also have a commentary by my sister, Marge, in response to this story:
Your bird-watching story reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. It was July and John’s brother was staying with us for a week and because he sleeps in the TV/treadmill room, I wasn’t able to use the treadmill for my regular exercise. So I started walking outside, again, and was using a very nice biking/hiking path adjacent to a local history museum. As I was rounding my final curve and approaching the parking lot which was directly adjacent to the rather busy street, I noticed a bench. The bench was facing the parking lot/street and I thought, man, I sure wouldn’t want to sit there and look at THAT view—as I passed the bench, I looked in the opposite direction from what you would see if seated and I stopped right in my tracks—a beautiful vista of restored prairie, blue sky, no houses, no cars, totally peaceful. So, I often remember that, and think about which direction I’m looking in life—and which direction life seems to be ‘forcing’ me to look (as though I were sitting on the bench) and realizing that there can be a very different view if I only turn around.