The Messenger

by Tim Bascom

Painted Bunting by Graham Tobin

When I was twelve, I encountered the most amazing songbird on the bluffs of the Missouri River in northeast Kansas. It was no bigger than a slender sparrow, but it had a blue head, a scarlet breast, and a lime-green back. I know, I didn’t believe it myself. When that lively creature swooped to a branch ten feet away, I thought I was hallucinating or maybe having an honest-to-God supernatural encounter. I half expected the vibrant little being to speak to me like an Old Testament angel.
        Yes, I had seen other bright birds in Kansas, such as the lemon-yellow Goldfinches that flitted around pastures or a rarer Indigo Bunting flashing from a phone line into the trees like a splinter of cobalt sky. Once, I had even spotted a Rose-breasted Grosbeak high in a neighbor’s hackberry, with its fat white beak and bloodred patch of breast. But never anything with a mix of blue, red, and green feathers! Nothing so wildly out of place.
        I stayed as still as I could, seated on a handmade bench in that sweltering valley, where a farmer had allowed us to build a getaway shack. I was waiting for the rest of my family to return from a hike to a spring upstream, and in that hot, cicada-droning glen of walnuts and oaks, this unexpected visitor seemed absolutely impossible. I was two miles from the not-so-charming “Muddy Mo,” where the most unusual fowl to be found were common-looking, white-and-gray Plovers dashing here and there, blurting “Peet! Peet!” Nothing this otherworldly had ever appeared in the Kansas I knew, and as a result I couldn’t help wondering whether it might actually be what I hoped. A divine messenger!
        I should explain that I was a deeply religious child. I had been raised by missionary parents, so I had developed an early sense of mysterium tremendum—that skin-prickling, shivery sense of awe that comes with any experience so uncanny that it might be supernatural. In fact, I had spent five of my twelve years on the other side of the globe, in Ethiopia, where we were surrounded by deeply worshipful people who saw God manifested everywhere. In that other land, I had witnessed an array of winged wonders, such as tiny Malachite Kingfishers with azure wings and flaming-orange beaks, that hovered around the perimeter of a lake nestled in the crater of an extinct volcano. I had seen heavy-headed Hornbills with scimitar beaks. I had seen African Darters that swam submerged except for a thin, curved neck, plunging into the depths and not reappearing for fifty yards.
        Such foreign creatures, you might think, would have inspired even more of the mystical response that this lone blue-green-scarlet bird was now raising in me as I sat completely still in Kansas, staring and staring. However, those birds didn’t have the same effect because virtually everything about Ethiopia felt predictably strange. With such an abundance of unusual fowl, no single one seemed as extraordinary as this loner in the dogwood by the creek.
        I sat stone-still, as if I had stepped into myth itself—as if I had gone back to the time when Noah, after the earth-engulfing flood, welcomed back the dove that carried an olive leaf, signaling new life. In my Children’s Bible, given to me when I was sent to the mission boarding school in Ethiopia, I had marveled at an illustration of that fabled dove with a sprig of greenery alighting on Noah’s outstretched hand, and now I waited with similar awe, hoping to receive whatever message this modern emissary brought.
        Cultures from around the world have legends about birds with supernatural powers. Able to defy gravity, they seem inherently transcendent—like the heavens above and whatever mysteries lie beyond. In Ethiopia, the Oromo have told for centuries of a winged messenger sent from the spirit realm to help humans avoid the burden of mortality. This bird, named Holawaka, was sent to earth to tell humans that they could rejuvenate by simply stripping off their aging skin. New skin would grow back, and they would return to being young. The only problem is that Holawaka was an easily distracted envoy. When he came upon a snake eating from a tasty carcass, he felt so hungry that he exchanged his secret for a few bites of food, telling the snake instead that it could become immortal if it just learned to shed its skin.
        The Native Americans of the Kansas plains, such as the Wichita or Pawnee, also held birds in great respect. They still do, noting that our winged relatives are the first to speak in the morning, helping to wake everyone with song. And of all the birds, the one respected most by Native Americans is the eagle, since it flies highest. In earlier times, a warrior who had proven himself in battle or leadership would be given an eagle feather, that he would wear as a symbol of honor. Today still, if a Plains Indian stands to speak, he or she will often hold an eagle feather. Since the Creator speaks only truth and since the eagle approaches closest to the Creator, anyone holding an eagle feather must speak the truth as well.
        There are many other examples of sacred mythological birds, such as the hummingbirds that were celestial companions of the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. Or the giant Thunderbird of the northwestern Pacific region, which the Quileute believed to live in a cave on the peak of Mt. Olympus, making thunder when it clapped its wings.
        What these mythical birds all have in common is transcendence. Either the bird is a spirit or an intermediary between the spirit world and earth. And that seems like a pretty natural reason for a 12-year-old Kansan, especially one who spent half his life in the spiritually rich atmosphere of Ethiopia, to think that an impossibly colorful songbird was a heavenly messenger—to explain why he might give that little creature the same reverence as an archangel.
        At the mission boarding school in Addis Ababa, where I was required to memorize Bible verses every morning, I had been taught dozens of miracle stories. I was quite familiar with the tale of the loyal Israelites Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who refused to bow to the Babylonian king as a deity. Having read about them being forced into a furnace, I marveled at the protecting angel who appeared at their side, calmly conversing with them as the flames blazed. Bible stories suggested that children could be visited by the Divine too. Young Samuel, after being turned over to the High Priest by his mother, heard God speaking directly to him in the night, telling him the fate of his lenient master and corrupt sons. Of course, I didn’t desire such weighty news, but I thrilled at the prospect that—through a magical songbird in its own technicolor dreamcoat—I might actually hear God speaking directly to me.
        I received no outright voice, but after that blue-green-scarlet bird finally flew away down the wooded valley, I was so full of uncanny awe that I didn’t even think to go looking for my family. In England, enthusiasts who spot a spectacular bird call it a “crippler” because it paralyzes them; and that seems apt. I still didn’t have the means to tell my parents or brothers about the encounter once they came around the bend. Like young Samuel in the holy dark, I was too stunned. Believing that this brightly hued bird was supernatural, I kept the sighting private, afraid to trust my senses, yet hopeful that God might have sent a messenger to me alone, as my own personal sign.
        You can imagine how disappointed I was when, upon getting home that evening, I flipped through my mother’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America and found the exact same out-of-this-world bird identified as one of many migratory songbirds that inhabit North America. “Painted Bunting” it was called. And though it was rarely seen north of Oklahoma—almost never in a wooded valley in northeast Kansas—nevertheless it was explainable. It was terrestrial, not “extraterrestrial,” which brought me down to earth with jarring disappointment.
        Much time has passed since that summer in northeast Kansas. Somewhere along the line I stopped looking for divine messengers, whether in the form of a bird or an angel. My cosmology changed. Nature, with all its mind-boggling patterns and variety, had not stopped suggesting a creator, and God still existed for me intellectually, but God seemed removed, not as accessible as I had hoped. Although I felt the occasional old desire for a personal sign, I didn’t expect it.
        More time passed, and I shifted myself out of the center of the picture, where I had so stubbornly stayed, wanting to be specially recognized, important, divinely set apart. Then I began to think of my feathered friends differently. Today, when I recall that unexpected Painted Bunting—the only one I have ever seen—I marvel anew. Maybe, in some sense, it actually was delivering a message.
        The early 20th century British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, in a sonnet titled “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” describes all creatures speaking their own mysterious messages:

        Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
        Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
        Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
        Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

        In that uncanny sense, maybe it is enough that the Painted Bunting spoke itself into my consciousness half a century ago. Maybe it is enough that I remember it vividly. That I cherish it in my heart—as a wonder unlike any wonder.
        And actually, maybe all birds, no matter how nondescript, deserve similar amazement. Why not the petite brown House Wrens that are nesting in the redbud next to our porch, singing for five or ten minutes at a time, as if they cannot stop celebrating? Or the pair of fledgling Mourning Doves that have been sheltering in one of the raised beds of our garden, visited by a watchful mother? They may have a muted appearance, but what delight to see them, just a few days ago, overcome their fear and take to the air, making their waxy whistling sound.
        God remains awfully quiet in the wordy way that I once wanted, but how thankful I am that, despite all the environmental hazards that threaten to erase our avian kin, they still flap and flit and glide and soar across the sky. What pleasure to watch them commit to their aerial life, ready to remind me, as an earthbound creature, that transcendence is still, in some sense, possible.