The Finch and the Apple: A Tall Tale of Forgiveness

This story was inspired by a dream my husband had. In it, a bird flew into my mouth. My husband tried to get it to come out, but it was trying to climb out my ear. He doesn't remember if it ever flew away. 

Here is my interpretation of the story.

***
He prayed every morning to God recalling the previous days events and asking for forgiveness when he did something wrong or hurtful or foul even when he wasn't the perpetrator but the victim thinking that he was still somehow to blame. His prayers would sometimes take hours to complete. He rattled his transgressions off, list-style, point by boring points sometimes lost among the mundane. His knees ached from the hours of kneeling on the thinly carpeted floor. He was often late for school excused by his mother's note. He had more than 50 of these excuses on file each year.

One morning after a strange dream where a bird flew into his mouth and built a nest between his ears and incessantly chirped making him unable to pray and hear the word of God, he woke up, showered, ate his breakfast of Pop Tarts and Sunny D, and got to school on time. His teacher looked at him, unsure who he was, and said, "Good morning. You're name again?"

He replied, "Josef Benedict Smith, III."

"Good to finally meet you," and his teacher marked him present for the first time that year.

Josef was in a fabulous mood all day. He even caught himself whistling or humming unaware he was doing it, the song reminiscent of his dream. He smiled as he passed other students in the hall. He didn't sit alone in the cafeteria eating his packed lunch of a ham and American cheese sandwich with Miracle Whip, banana, Chips Ahoy, and strawberry-kiwi Capri Sun. Rather, he risked sitting next to students from his early morning class and they said: "Hello. I'm Sally. Have a seat. We were just talking about..." or "Hey. What's up?" or "God! I fucking hate that teacher. Don't you?" He didn't talk to anyone. He just sat quietly, eating, nodding occasionally in acknowledgment or disagreement. No one could tell.

He arrived home and was greeted by a little bird with yellow patches on its head and breast the rest of its body a brownish gray perched on the apple tree his mom and him planted a few years back. He recognized the bird from his dream and walked to the tree quietly hoping to not disturb it the bird. It just sat there as he approached.

When Josef got close enough to almost touch the bird, it flew off the branch, and Josef gasped loudly remembering the vision from his dream and the bird zipped into his mouth carrying with it a small piece of apple from the tree. Shocked, Josef closed his mouth and swallowed hard, and the bird and the tidbit of apple it carried glided down his esophagus and filled his belly. He became dizzy and stumbled to his room. He plopped down on the bed and the room spun.

Soon, he found himself lost among a landscape of Honeycrisps, finches, bright sunlight, and soft moonglow. The song of dreams echoed creating a beautiful round filling everything.

"Hello," whispered Josef. "Hello?"

He meandered the rows of trees ducking out of day into night and back again. He watched the ochers and viridians and crimsons and grays zip across the sky creating streaks of vibrant color that danced upon his eyes. He became dizzy again, the kind of dizzy right before throwing up, and fell to his knees. He started coughing and small strands of spittle flew out of his mouth. Next, he was heaving, stomach convulsing, and out flew the bird, the apple gone from its beak, wings dripping with saliva.

Josef was exhausted from the ordeal and laid on the grass looking up at the half day, half night sky. The finch hopped on his shoulder shaking its body to remove the spit. A little piece landed in his eye. He wiped it away with the cuff of his t-shirt.

"Hello," sang the finch.

"Hello," said Josef as if talking to a finch were nothing out of the ordinary.

"Why do you pray, Josef," asked the finch, its voice high and airy.

Josef hesitated. Then, replied, "To be forgiven?"

"Forgiveness, dear Josef, is not the land of finches or gods." The finch flew off Josef's shoulder and joined the myriad of finches in the apple orchard as another line in the beautiful round still echoing everywhere. Its gentle lullaby lulled Josef to sleep.

The aroma of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and apple pie wafted up to his bedroom and tickled the hairs inside his nose. He woke up -- the green and yellow walls of his room slowly coming in to focus, a small song outside his window, his mother yelling, "Josef! Josef! Dinner time!" He pushed himself off of his bed and walked to the window. A small finch greeted him with a cocked head and a wink. He smiled.

"I'm coming!" He yelled down to his mom. "Just one minute."

"Hurry up or it'll get cold," she yelled back.

Josef looked at the finch and said, "Thanks for the adventure. I think I understand."

He walked downstairs and joined his mother at the dinner table.

"Mom, why do you pray," he asked.

"Josef," she laughed. "That is a silly question," and dismissed him.

"No, mom. Why do you pray?"

"I don't know, Josef. I just do. I learned it from my parents, and I've been doing it ever since. It's just a habit now, I guess. And besides, if we don't ask God for forgiveness, who do we ask?"

"But what if God can't forgive us?"

"Josef, let's stop this silly conversation. God always forgives. It's His job.

"Now, how was your day?"

Josef smiled. "Good. It was the best."

"Excellent," said his mother as she started sorting through the pile of mail next to her dinner plate. "Now, clean your plate so we can have some apple pie."

The next morning, and every morning after, Josef awoke humming the song of the finches with the taste of apples upon his lips.

Prayer and Mediation

I have always had a deep sense of exploration and wonder. I have always felt that there is something greater than me. In the past, I called that something God. God was the Catholic God, the God of the Trinity. God was equal parts loving and fearful. God was infallible and infinite. He was the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega. In order to go to heaven, you needed to accept Jesus into your heart and confess your sins.

As I grew up, the nature of God changed. I began to question the essence and nature of God. It seemed to me that the Catholic God was confusing and contradictory. I wondered how God could tell his followers to love and be compassionate of all and also condemn nonbelievers to hell and eternal suffering.

This confusion made me feel lost. I wanted to know who and what to believe in. Catholicism gave me guideposts in my faith. I knew I was holy because I went to church on Sunday, I prayed before I ate, I read the Bible, I tithed, I taught Sunday school. If I didn’t believe in the Catholic God, what were my actions but hollow? Who was I but a shell?

So I searched. I searched in the Tarot, in science, in Nietzsche, in myself, in leaders I admired, in friends, in nature, in the spaces and places between things. I tried to find the spirituality and faith I once had.

I found many things – beauty, love, respect, humility, vastness, absence, presence, joy, explanations – but I did not find my spirituality. What I once had was eluding me. It was if with every corner I turned my spirit turned the one right ahead of me. I kept getting glimpses of it and yet I never saw it. I was chasing my shadow.

I had to change course. Instead of searching for something outside of myself, something greater than me, I needed to find me. I needed to go deeper inside and see what made, and makes, me tick – how I move about in this world.

I remember my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Bishop. She was an amazing woman with a great sense of wonder. One spring day she told our class about astronomy, but in order to fully grasp it it needed to be dark outside. She told us to meet her in the schoolyard at 8pm that night.

I showed up eager to learn. Mrs. Bishop brought telescopes and a night sky map. It was my first memory of seeing the stars through a telescope, and somehow they didn’t seem so far away. I learned how to find Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, and the Seven Sisters. Mrs. Bishop made astronomy seem so simple. In order to understand it, you simply needed to pause, observe, and reflect.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized the depth of Mrs. Bishop’s teachings. She wasn’t really teaching about astronomy. Astronomy was just a tool she used to teach us how to learn, explore, and deepen understanding. If we could pause, observe, and reflect on something as vast as the heavens, as space, then we should be able to do it with anything.

My good friend Margaret recently asked me to attend prayer/mediation workshops at her church. Margaret has always welcomed me into her faith. She is a model of letting her spirit speak through her actions. She is a mentor of mine for spiritual growth.

Over the last seven years, Margaret has invited me to various church functions and services, and I have politely turned down most of them. This time, however, something resonated within me. Partly, it was because I wanted/want to walk more intentionally in this world and this opportunity seemed like an excellent way to increase my intentionality. Partly, it was because I was/am no longer angry at the church (Catholic or otherwise). Partly, it was because my fondness for Margaret has grown tremendously and this seemed an excellent way to connect with her on a deeper level. All of these reasons converged and I committed to attending the workshops.

Previously, I would have attended the workshops in search of something outside of myself. This time, I attended the workshops with the focus solely on me – understanding what role prayer and mediation played in my life, in my journey towards leadership. I found myself pausing, observing, and reflecting. I took the lessons I learned – that prayer and meditation are simply a method to focus quietly on intention – and applied it to me. And I found a glimmer of myself. My shadow paused momentarily before running around the next corner.

The prayer/meditation workshops lasted only four sessions, so I needed to find something else that would enable me to pause, observe, and reflect. Another mentor of mine, Kica, co-teaches mediation classes for the San Francisco Buddhist Center. Coincidentally, their next six-week Introduction to Meditation class started the Tuesday after my last prayer/meditation workshop. I signed up.

I had my first class last Tuesday. I went with no expectations. I had written my first blog entry the same day, so I was really focused on nothingness. And nothingness is what happened. There is no way to describe the realization of being outside of your self by going deeply inside of your self through concentrating only on breathing. It is like realizing that the shadow I thought to be my spirit is really just my shadow and that my shadow is really who I am – space with little form that eludes everything and everyone and disappears in great light and great darkness.

My spiritual journey is my path towards leadership. Prayer and mediation are vehicles/tools I draw upon to pause, observe, and reflect. They help me step into nothingness.