Wings

In Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, a street preacher stops a guy in his mid-20’s to ask if he’s been saved. The guy answers, “Anybody with a good car doesn’t need to be saved.

It’s difficult to admit we need help beyond what we can give ourselves. We are raised to be daddy’s big girl or boy.

My grandmother slipped me a five one Sunday while we were at her house. It fell out of my pocket somewhere and by the time I realized it was gone it was time to go. I wanted to tell her, not simply because she might give me another, but because she’d take me into her lap.

“You’ll never be too big for me to hold,” she'd tell me.

A few years later, I didn’t want to be held by anyone. I wanted to be too big.

Then, the move into mid-life when we carry our umbilical cord around looking for a place to plug it in.

After one of the big fires at Yellowstone, two rangers were surveying the damage when they saw a bald eagle perched on the stump of a burned-out tree. The ladder in their truck brushed up against her and she disintegrated into ashes. As she crumbled, her three babies ran out from beneath her wings. She could have left them in the fire, but she gathered them under her wings and never moved during the intense heat and suffocating smoke.

The rangers took her babies to a wildlife refuge and a year later they were released.

There is a monument at the spot where she sheltered her babies. It says, “Here lies the American bald eagle whose protective wings gave her babies life.”

Every summer, three large bald eagles circle the spot, each wearing the red tag from the refuge.

I am remembering the One who lamented, “How often I would have gathered you under my wings, but you would not.”