Mynah Bird

Mynah bird, mynah bird
How do you do?
A peckin’ and a pluckin'
On my old black shoe.

Mynah bird, mynah bird
Perchin’ on my fence
I just can’t understand you
‘cause you make no sense.

O the things that I’ve forgotten!
And O the things that I have lost!
The things I’ve buried: dead and rottin’
The things I’ve done and what they cost.

Mynah bird, mynah bird
A stranger in your land,
I’m tryin’ hard to listen hard
So I can understand.

Mynah bird, Minah bird
What did you say?
Was it supplication?
What’d you pray?

Memories like puzzle pieces
Scatter on the wooden floor
Or like cut crystal glasses

That shatter loudly all the more.

Mynah bird, Mynah bird
There’s something that I lack
Mynah bird, myna bird
Take me back!
Mynah bird, mynah bird
Take me back!
Take me back!
Take me back!

Miracles

I was looking at the desert today as the military bus took us to the base to teach English. In other places the dunes are exotic, grand and sweeping and graceful as the curves of a nude beauty. But here, today, it was just barren and skuzzy with dried brush. I wondered what this area was like hundreds of thousands of years ago when there must have been fertile lands, long before the desert killed it all off. I wondered if the land could be reawakened and I imagined that I would walk and sing the song of ancient word and melody; and I imagined the rain falling and deciduous forest springing up around me. And I wondered: if I walked in swaths across the desert like a rewind of a slow moving scythe putting the forest in place rather than cutting it all down: How long would it take me to change the land and alter the climate? If only I knew the right words and the melody! And I thought: if only the power of God resided within me to do such a thing.

Then something inside me said: “but such power does reside in you.”
And I responded that I had no idea how to tap into such power.
“That isn’t how you should think about it.”
And how should I think about it? I asked.
“You shouldn’t exactly think at all. The power of God is in everyone, waiting.”
And how do I wake it up then?
“It is your self you must wake.”

When I was a child, I had a canary I called, “Tony.” I don’t know what possessed me to give a canary a name like “Tony” but I did. I liked that bird and sometimes I would let him out of the cage to fly around the room even if it meant having to clean bird crap off the walls and the floor. Eventually he would be ready to return to his cage and he would let me catch him and I’d put him away. He sang the sweetest songs as he swung on his swing. Sometimes I let him bite my finger to see how hard he could do it, and his little tongue would lick my finger as he bit.

One day I came into my room to find Tony on his back on the bottom of the cage. I knew he was dead, but I stuck my hand in to nudge him a bit to see if he would get up. I even pushed on his chest as if to resuscitate him, but he was stiff and motionless. I cried a while about it and then I prayed to God: “O, God, if you just bring him back to life, I’ll go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life.” What can I say? I was a child and I figured God would make deals with people. What did I know of theology? My bird was dead and only the Master of Life, Death and All Miracles could bring him back.

I’m glad we didn’t bury him right away, because about a half an hour later he was up swinging and singing as usual. I was astonished, and I went and told my mother that he was alive. She came to my room and did not respond to the “miracle” that I had just witnessed. She calmly gave me a couple of rational alternatives: “Perhaps he had had a seizure, or, even more likely, that he was spooked and flew around his cage and knocked himself out.”

The bird was dead, mom. Sorry, but he was stiff with what I now know is rigor mortis. But the need we have to give rational explanations for things like that is very telling. We will see only what we believe in, or want to believe in. You tell a kid there is a God who is master of life and death, that walking on water and passing through walls is possible and he will believe it until, the real thing happens, and then we explain the miracle away, because we don’t really believe in them or that they are really possible. Why would the God of the Universe be bothered to resurrect a kid’s canary? Aren’t there more important miracles needed in this world?

I know that Christian Church people of the Restoration Movement are proud of being sensible people who don’t go in for all that emotional Pentecostal kind of stuff. God gave us a mind and expects us to use it and all that. And that is how I was raised. Yes, yes, miracles took place in the bible, back in Bible days and then they stopped because you can’t really trust anything that’s not in the Bible and the world is full of crazy religious people and if they aren’t crazy, then they’re charlatans.

All the same, Tony was alive and I suddenly realized, with a quickly falling visage, that I had promised God that I would go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life. You know…church isn’t a lot of fun for a kid. As an adult, I can’t say it is a very thrilling experience either, but for a kid it means dressing up in ill-fitting, uncomfortable clothing and having to stifle unlimited energy for hours on end, listening to a preacher use long meaningless words, while sitting on pews that were not made for a human rump, let alone a child whose legs cannot even reach the floor. I’m afraid to say, that in the course of my life, I have failed, miserably and egregiously, to keep my childhood promise to God. I don’t think he ever believed I would keep that promise. I think, sometimes that God has a kind of perverse sense of humor (as anthropomorphic as that may sound). I imagine him chuckling, good humouredly, at my foolishness. Beyond my anthropomorphic projections, God is Love. I can pray to Love, I can pray to God: “Same, same” as my Arab students say. Love Loves me and Loves through me. I say he chuckles because he didn’t care about the promise I had made, and he showed me how foolish such promises are.

So why did he bring my canary back to life? Well, I think it was to teach me something. I have learned two things from this event: one is that God is pretty good at keeping promises, but I really suck at it. And secondly, that what we believe is what we will see. I saw a bird come back to life. My mom saw a canary that was unconscious for a while.

What is real?
And what does that voice in me mean when it says, “It is your self you must wake.”