Monday Meditation

what is mine to do?

I am writing this on morning of my departure to spend five days in the Sax-Zim Bog  Nature Reserve,  in Northern Minnesota. You may be asking what on earth am I going to such a brutally cold area? (Sub-zero is normal and with high winds.) What Ornithologists call an eruption of birds occurring there.  I reserved this trip up last year so I would not have known an eruption of birds is occurring now. That is what ornithologists when call an abundance of particular birds appear. I’m searching especially the four species of owls there: snowy owl, boreal owl, northern hawk owl, great gray owl, alone with boreal chickadee, Bohemian waxwings, common redpolls and other birds that rarely if ever appear in the East. I am writing and sending this before the event. If I’m lucky, I’ll add an owl species is possible. 

Meanwhile, our nation turbulence remains. I continue to find the wisest way to walk. “What is my work to be done?” This comment by pastor-theologian Kenneth Tanner is one I appreciate. 

—

Whether we worship or loathe a political leader, when we give them too much of our attention, obsessing over the good or the bad they do—we might be enraged or enraptured, seeing them as the center of all that is good or evil—we make them a god.

This darkens the path in front of us, makes us less capable of the sort of contemplation that brings wisdom, less capable of the love the world around us needs. We become disoriented.

This is not a counsel to ignore the bad or deny the good of anyone—such discernments are essential to living responsibly—but it is a pastoral encouragement to place one's entire attention where it belongs, to place all of the senses before the only One who bears wisdom and love, and then empowered by Christ, to speak and act in the world in ways that bring healing and transfiguration.

Kenneth Tanner
Holy Redeemer Church
Rochester, Michigan 
2.6.25

The Boreal Owl. One of the more elusive owls of the north country.