St. Francis Reduxion - An Occasional Bestiary

July 17, 2009 by djackson.

On a visit to my parents’ home this week I spent considerable time contemplating the hummingbirds zipping around the feeders on the back porch. They dogfight for purchase on the perches of those sugar-water dispensers with an agility that any fighter pilot would envy. They so intrigued me that I decided to do a little research. I learned, among other things, that Montezuma himself stitched hummingbird feathers into his royal garments. These tiny avians flash some amazing color, but their feathers contain no actual pigment. Instead, crystal platelets of varying thicknesses refract the sunlight and throw out selected segments of the spectrum. These colors blaze brightest when the sun sits behind the observer and hits the bird head-on. I also learned that, like most birds, hummers feed their young by barfing into the babies’ mouths. With the hummingbird’s rapier-like proboscis, however, this can look more like stabbing than nursing. Naturalist John L. Tveten calls it a “sword-swallowing routine,” which, though alarming to the viewer, does no harm to the fledglings. Speaking of baby hummers, my reading also tells me that they have no down but crack out of the egg completely naked and must rely entirely on the mother’s presence for enough borrowed warmth to survive. Of course, given their eye-blurring wingbeats and Red Bull heart rates, hummers need lots of calories, consuming beyond their own body-weight daily and living constantly within a few hours of starvation. For all this, and despite their tiny size, certain species fly clean across the Gulf of Mexico non-stop during their annual migrations.

With all of that in mind, and with due apologies to one of my favorite saints, I offer the following.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird,
Whose glory rests not within herself
But reflects the light of her Lord.
She teaches us to hover
With our face toward God’s light
That others might see his beauty in us
And offer Him their praises.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird,
Whose bill is a sword that feeds her young
Even where it seems to slay.
She teaches us to be sword-swallowers
Who fearlessly devour
The sword of the Spirit, the Word of God,
That wounds us only to nourish.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird,
Whose naked young cannot warm themselves,
But must nestle near her nurturing breast.
She teaches us that we little ones
Cannot not be warm alone,
But must huddle together beneath the breast
Of the church who cherishes us.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird,
Who holds no life within herself
But lives as her Lord provides.
She teaches us that we must ever seek
The living Word that feeds us,
And draw our life from the Source of Life,
The Spirit who sustains us.

Let us now praise God for our sister Hummingbird.
Like the lilies, Montezuma in all his glory
Envied her beautiful raiment.
She teaches us that life is more
Than this world’s envious goods,
That when God’s children seek Him first,
All other things He adds.

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