Wednesday, December 20: Cardinals

The cardinal is the Ohio state bird, but even so, they were a rare sight where I was growing up in Ohio. I loved discovering a cardinal in our yard, or in the grove of trees that separated our yard from our neighbor's. I always felt an inexplicable excitement when I spotted one. There was a pair living in that grove of trees one summer, and I would sometimes lie down on the ground in the shade, try to breathe as softly as possible, and watch them interact. The male had a loud, sudden song that was often answered by a softer, slightly less musical version by the female.

This year the theme of our fireplace Christmas decorations is the cardinal. I hadn't realized how many cardinal decorations I've acquired over the years! Cardinals are still a rare sight where I live in west central Minnesota, but they are still visible at times even in the dead of winter--perhaps this is why they are associated with Christmas (along with their red color).

Over the years I've acquired a lot of random facts about cardinals, mostly in an attempt to determine why I've always been so attracted to them. For instance, cardinals almost always live in pairs, raising their young together. It is rare to see one or the other (male or female) alone. They are more likely than other birds to act outside of the gender norms (even though, of course, the female is still the one who is laying eggs). 

Based on this information, I've come to consider the sighting of a cardinal as a sign that I ought to be paying attention to balance and flexibility. We all have both what are typically considered male and female energies within us. We all need to have the capacity to do what comes most naturally, and to act slightly outside of our comfort level or the societal norms associated with who we are. 

I struggle with both balance and flexibility. I am working hard to live a more balanced life, to claim my gifts and live my passions, to do whatever both gives me joy and best serves the common good (and cut out other stuff). I am working hard to be flexible about what that looks like on a day-to-day basis. I have a tendency to get stuck in a specific vision or idea of how things should be. Blessedly, my daily work is my best teacher in both of these areas. Working in the community engagement field and our work in our home with people in need require a great attention to both flexibility and balance.

Everything about the Christmas story is about both flexibility and balance--about living outside the norm and being OK with that reality, able to sustain oneself anyway. Mary is pregnant before marriage. Joseph marries her anyway. They choose flexibility over resistance, choose to say yes rather than hold onto their original vision for what their marriage would look like.

They make a harrowing trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Mary gives birth in a stable. Again, flexibility and balance must have been necessary ingredients in these Christmas story moments. They didn't ask for or expect these things to happen. They needed to sustain themselves anyway, to find some sense of balance in such a confusing, fearful time.

They're visited by shepherds and wise men--two groups of people about as different as any two groups in their society could have been. To me, this is a sign of the importance of balance which Jesus reiterated in every phase of his life, welcoming children and tax collectors, adulterers and homemakers, into his beloved circle. 

More recently I've learned that some believe cardinals are a sign that a person who has passed away is making a visit or delivering a message. I love the idea that my affinity for cardinals may also be about wanting to keep the veil between this reality and other realities thin and open. I feel close to my parents, aunts, uncles, and other loved ones who have died at Christmas--I grieve but also delight in the memories I have of them, so many centered on the holidays. All of us who have lost beloved people feel the sharpness of that loss during special times of year like this one.

Mary and Joseph, too, sustained many losses. The first significant loss was the loss of their homeland. They were forced to flee to Egypt after the birth, to live in fear of their child being murdered. And that was the second loss--the reality that other children died because their son was born. I can't imagine living with that knowledge. But they also likely saw how their child was doing exactly what Mary had dreamed he'd do in her conversation with Elizabeth soon after she conceived: that he would reverse everything they had known or understood up to that point about hierarchy and family and what right and what is wrong.

Losses also require flexibility and balance--an ability to see the whole story of your relationship with the person you've lost, of their impact on the world, and to balance grief and joy. The older I get, the more forgiving I am of my parents' faults, and the less likely I am to either overlook them or get stuck thinking about them. Also, I become less and less sentimental about the losses I've sustained--and more able to feel the joy of knowing each person in their fullness. 

I embrace the cardinal as a sign of flexibility, balance, connection to those loss--but also as a sign of joy. Now, as when I was a child, my heart literally leaps when I spot a cardinal--the flash of red in drab surroundings, the bright color of Christmas.