This summer on our daily walk, usually pushing our 3.5-year-old in her stroller while wearing our 3-month-old on my chest, we were often graced by an indigo bunting that would sing from the power line. Their song is as iridescent as their plumage, as they repeat similar phrases in pairs, like the synonymous parallelism of Hebrew poetry. I’ve seen their song transcribed as what! what! where? where? see it! see it! As our steps brought us near, the bunting would dart into the prairie, finding the highest thistle to perch and sing its next psalm. 

“Doing theology,” 20^th-century theologian Karl Barth once quipped, “is like painting a bird in flight.” A red-breasted grosbeak blurs across the road and disappears into an alder thicket. So too thoughts of God and intimations of the divine tend to flit, flicker, dart, dash. In my experience, thinking of God isn’t the type of thinking that crystalizes and coheres into an easy system. It is thinking that is on its toes. It is responsive and alert. It involves thinking on the wing, because the object of theology, like a bird in flight, is startlingly alive and on the go. 

While I’ve tended to think about theology and spirituality as indoor and text-based practices, I’ve found myself wondering recently: what if they are more like the type of arts that are best done outside and on the go? Less like studio art or painting from reference, and more like painting en plein air? What if, in our climate-changed, sixth-extinction era of the Anthropocene, a first step towards re-mending our spiritual relationship with nature were simply to step outside and open ourselves to encounter with the more-than-human world—being startled by a cardinal alighting on a cedar branch, witnessing a river eddy and flow, being present to the first blush of fall color?

Where else could sacred presence be but flickering in the momentary encounters of life with life?

Prayer: “What! What! Where? Where? See it! See it!”  —Indigo Bunting