New York City. Wild life. Squirrels, rats, roaches, and pigeons. Lots and lots of pigeons. And lots of adults with opinions about pigeons, happy to share them with little me, a child of the city. “Don’t touch them; they’re dirty. They carry disease.” I wondered if the little band of iridescent feathers at the base of the pigeon’s neck could where the invisible germs live. Perhaps the shimmer of the feathers was really the light reflecting off the translucent germs. For what else could “invisible” mean?
Of course this only made the pigeons more fascinating and, like many children, I regularly dashed at groups of pigeons, hoping to catch one. When that proved impossible, I resigned myself to enjoying what did happen: they scattered, often lifting off, sometimes in a graceful curving group formation. When I became a teen, however, I discerned that pigeons might actually find this “game” annoying. So I stopped.
This empathetic self-control was my default position until I saw the following, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A pigeon sat on a low wall. A little girl, seven years old at most, ran towards the pigeon. The pigeon flew up, turned in a tight circle and landed back on the wall, about three feet north of where he had been. The girl hopped over, hooted with joy, and mock-lunged at the pigeon again. The pigeon flew up again in its tight circle, and landed about three feet north of his second perch. He turned towards the girl, waiting. The girl lunged, the bird moved over, the girl lunged, the bird moved over… They kept playing until the girl’s parents, who had not been watching, suddenly noticed the girl’s seventh lunge. Immediately understanding that she had been terrorizing a pigeon, they called her over and told her to stop.
I see pigeons differently now, calling them by the more respectful name, which they deserve: rock dove. Rock doves nest comfortably on the ledges of stone buildings, adapting easily to the human the hustle and bustle of the city. They are descended from carrier pigeons, with a history of working in partnership with human beings. Rock doves show more variety in their feathered coloration than any other species of bird. White, black, grey, brown, solid-colored, spotted, striped, regular or irregular color patterns: all socialize together in peace. No wonder we see doves as a symbol of peace; now wonder they serve as spiritual guides to many human beings.
One afternoon I ran into a very poor man who spends his days on Main Street, because the neighborhood restaurant owners and shoppers feed him every day. He was sitting at the edge of a parking lot, sharing the remains of a MacDonald’s hamburger bun with some very calm rock doves. He greeted me, pointed to the doves and said, “These are my friends from where I live on Hastings Street. In the morning, they knock on the window with their beaks to wake me up. Then they follow me here. So I share my food with them.” And then he said, “God bless you.” And I said, “Same to you.” And he pointed to his heart and said, “I’m still waiting for my God.”
And I was surprised. Not by him. Not by his story about the doves, which I easily believed. And not by his commitment to a cycle of kindness: receiving food and sharing it; receiving a gift and giving a blessing. In the short few months I had known him, he was always kind. No, I was surprised at myself, at suddenly confronting my own assumption that he would see God as I did, the hand behind the handouts. But whatever he had been praying for, whether it was a fresh start, an end to the endless bureaucracy that makes it so hard to restart, good health, or family reunification, had not been granted.
So I wondered: how can I claim to be developing spiritual discernment in a world where God hides, appears, and then hides again? How can I pursue tikkun olam, arrogantly believing that I am raising the sparks of divine energy in a broken world, when a man who is fed by strangers and escorted by doves thinks that God is hidden? How can I practice compassion if I treat a fellow creature with grudging, distant respect until he proves himself? It seems sometimes as if my ideas are no ideas, just self-absorbed fictions.
Once I went to a feminist peace conference in Riverside, California. There I attended a session on Israel and Palestine featuring three speakers. An Israeli professor spoke about how difficult it is to be a political scientist in a country so conflicted about its foreign policy. A Palestinian-Israeli graduate student spoke about how difficult it is to live bearing two cultural identities at odds with each other. Then the third speaker, an American activist, spoke. She blasted the first two speakers because their stories did not fit the story she wanted to tell. Clearly, she said, they were both deliberately disingenuous, purposely telling only half-truths. And then she told what she thought was the truth about their lives.
That evening, my colleague and I drove out to the desert, to Joshua Tree National Monument. We sat on brown rocks, piled at all crazy angles. We watched the sun set and we watched a million stars emerge in a black sky. And we felt comforted.
I wrote to a friend about this experience of consolation, and she wrote back: “Nothing like a dose of meaninglessness to set things right.” And I was shocked: how could she call the stars “meaningless”? For me, the sky is a reminder of ultimate meaning: we all stand together, biologically interconnected on a tiny short-lived planet and this is bigger than any meaning we might construct socially and politically.
But my friend experienced the starry sky as a deep healing well of nothingness, a respite from all the crazy meanings of the human world, meanings that we hold too dear, for far too long; meanings that are not meanings, but self-absorbed fictions. Meanings that make us unable to see what anything means.
Unexpected encounters with fellow creatures can shake us out of self-absorption, and so can a great work of literature, if it is read attentively. Many of us are familiar with the fantastical story of the prophet Jonah, but few of us have thought about the meaning of Jonah’s name. The Hebrew name of the prophet Jonah is Yonah, which means “dove.” Picture a story in which the “prophet” is a carrier pigeon named Dove.
God places a message on Dove’s leg calling the Assyrians of Nineveh to repent. But Dove knows the contents of the message, and has strong opinions about the evil of its recipient, so Dove deliberately flies in the wrong direction. He roosts on a ship that will take him far away. But a storm comes up and he has pity on the human sailors, so he flies towards the stormy sea. A leaping fish gobbles him. Distraught and feeling guilty, he calls out to God and apologizes. God sends a message to the fish, who spits Dove out onto shore. Dove, chastened but still opinionated, flies to Nineveh to deliver the message. Nineveh’s king immediately calls for all humans and animals to repent. The astonished Dove, utterly drained from his journey, flies up to a hillside and rests in the shade of a leafy vine. But a worm eats the vine and the exhausted Dove feels like he is going to die. God asks, “Is it good for you to be so upset about the vine?” Dove says, “It’s best for me to be so upset that I die.” “Come on, Dove,” God says. “The people of Nineveh are clueless and confused, and a lot of animals are in their care. You have pity on creatures you didn’t even help raise. Shouldn’t I have pity for Nineveh?”
Maybe a bird can be a prophet. Maybe God gives information directly to doves, and we have to be attentive to their signs. But this privilege doesn’t mean that doves are mechanical or neutral. They have opinions, too. And sometimes they, too, are in need of moral education.
I imagine, though I have no real basis for it, that the King of Nineveh identified with the lone dove. Perhaps he had pity on the trained carrier pigeon, stuck delivering someone else’s message. Perhaps he felt himself in a similar situation, implementing, or at least living out, the logical consequences of his predecessor’s brutal policies. And perhaps he yearned to fly just a little higher than he believed the dove was free to. Perhaps his pity for the dove motivated him to do what he imagined the dove could not: make a free moral choice.
Perhaps the King identified with the dove not even knowing that this dove, too, had refused his mission. Refusal put the dove in danger, but he bore the dangers bravely to the point of exhaustion. Perhaps the King identified with the dove without even knowing the extent of their kinship. Dove and King did have something significant in common. When they were unhappy with their own situations, and their emotions were aroused, they were able to feel pity. But neither had cultivated compassion as a spiritual practice. The King took it on, choosing to repent from brutality, after he saw a lone dove and received the bird’s message. But the bird himself received instruction directly from God. “You, my dear, have compassion when you feel like. But I have to practice it all the time! Try to see what that feels like!”
I am reminded briefly of the story of Job. Like Jonah, Job at the beginning of his story has many opinions about what is right and what is wrong — so many opinions that, when his daughters and sons party together, as they often do, he offers extra sacrifices to protect their moral record. When Job’s world falls apart, he cannot grasp how it happened to him, of all people, who had the moral calculus so completely under control. With God’s help, he grasps that he actually has no clue about how the universe is governed. Somehow, Job feels consoled by this meaninglessness under the desert stars. Or maybe he feels comforted by this meaning under the desert stars. He is able to move forward with his life restored, in the company of his ten children. These are the children whose lifestyle Job pitied, and tried to make up for. These are the children who did not actually need Job’s pity, the children whose joyous family gatherings first hinted that Job’s life, too, could be richer and freer. These are the children whose oldest sibling is named Yemimah, which means “Dove.”
Maybe most doves are playful, and maybe they aren’t. Maybe an escort of doves is a sign of God’s presence, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe, like us, doves have naïve moral opinions that they give up as they mature. Maybe doves really do carry messages from God and we have only to learn how to read them. Maybe I walk by dozens of doves every day and miss dozens of messages. All I know for sure is that I will look more closely next time.
— Laura Duhan Kaplan, 2009; revised 2010
Image: www.oneworldmovement.org