“…to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning.”-Isaiah 61:3

Christmas Eve, 2024.

On a beautiful Christmas Eve morning I woke up feeling sad. No real reason. Of course I could find some, the empty places at the table, more ever year, the general overwhelming clamor that is the holidays, the vague sense of anti-climax about it all; but that would just be playing pin the tale on the emotion. So just vaguely sad.

As I sat looking out the dining room window at the birds, my mind reached back to a holiday party I had been to that week. I was my husband’s plus one for a group he is a part of, and we made the rounds being introduced and chatting. My husband moved away to talk to someone, and I introduced myself to a woman standing near by. One minute we were engaging in polite small talk, and the next, having an incredibly deep and authentic conversation about the loss of her daughter 5 years ago. A beautiful young woman killed a particularly senseless way, that ended life as it had been known for her and many others as well. It was as though everything and everyone else fell away as she described what it had been like to live with the eternal raw wound of the lost child. She told me how in her anguish, she began to paint and to write and how art began to heal her, as much as she can ever be healed, and beauty and life began to be possible again. One moment small talk, then suddenly something else altogether, the Unseen Hand took over and a real connection happened. I walked away baffled, but honored. I sensed it meant something, had happened for a reason, but for what reason I could not say.

And so, in that moment on Christmas Eve, that encounter came back to me. I thought of her, her family, several families having a much worse day than me, with a real reason for sadness. I began to pray for them. That THEY would know peace, that THEY would feel joy again, that THEY would be comforted. That I would get over myself…immediately. Amen.

In the stillness that followed, I looked out and saw a red-winged blackbird…then another, and another. They came, first five, then ten, twenty, fifty. I looked out the back door and realized that the woods were alive with them, hundreds of them, every branch full. Occasionally something would spook them and they’d all take off as one, and then settle back down, a seething, ebony carpet on my still green grass. Finally, responding to some unheard signal, as one, they took to the wing for parts unknown, lifting my heart with it, in a cacophony of midnight wings, and flashes of scarlet, against the bright, blue, winter sky.