There’s a tree exterior the window of the visitor room of my guardian’s house. When the wind blows, the tree’s branches gently brush the aspect of the home, issuing a quiet scraping sound that’s all of the extra irritating within the early hours of the day. That is white noise, nothing however a background hum to ears like mine that know this place properly. I hold sleeping.
Maybe that’s why the tree began to name my title.
“Eric,” got here the voice. “Eric. Eric.”
The tree doesn’t converse, after all. The noise is one thing else—a fowl, we predict. My spouse—herself puzzled by listening to my title on the wind—produces her cellphone on which has been put in an app that detects fowl cries.
It’s a grey catbird, the app informs us. It’s a cousin to the mockingbird, distinguished by its calls, grey and perky and—our greatest guess—nesting. It lives on this tree, so far as we are able to inform, a year-round inhabitant of the suburbs of Philadelphia. It sings and chirps, sounds simply ignored in opposition to the tapestry of the forest melody.
However there’s that one music: “Eric. Eric. Eric.”
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A web-based search reveals there are an entire host of different individuals—different Erics, maybe—who unmistakenly hear a selected title in that melodic mewing.
There’s a narrative in Scripture (1 Samuel 3:1–10) by which the Lord calls out to the longer term prophet Samuel, who mistakenly thinks the previous priest Eli is asking for him. Twice Samuel runs to see Eli solely to be despatched again to his room: “I didn’t name you.”
Solely on the third such event does Eli notice that it’s God who is asking out to Samuel. Solely then does Samuel flip his consideration to the Lord. “Communicate, your servant is listening,” he says.
I’m not suggesting that the grey catbird was some divine messenger, not in a literal sense. However I’m struck by this piercing cry so clearly resonant with my very own title. I’m struck by the parallels with the passage from the First E book of Samuel. And, like all good scholar of the Ignatian custom, I feel it clever to pause and ponder any second by which our lives ring and rhyme so clearly with the tales of Scripture.
What’s there to be taught?
Recall that God is in all issues and that each one issues can lead us nearer to God. So I pause and replicate on that piercing cry from the atypical, mundane, great thing about nature that caught my consideration, if only for a couple of seconds. I take into consideration how simple it turned to disregard that mild brushing of branches in opposition to the window, cut back that sound to easy white noise, and ignore the whispering of nature and hold sleeping. I think about how that particular fowl cry felt prefer it was only for me.
My title occurs to sound like one of many grey catbird’s calls. However I imagine all of us hear our names whispered within the wind, scratched in opposition to the door, or gurgled within the effervescent stream, if we however pay attention. God may not offer us a selected message, as was the case with Samuel. However God is inviting us to concentrate, look deeper, and see within the easy and the mundane one thing extraordinary and enchanting.
The place is God talking your title? What’s God inviting you to behold? How would possibly God’s quiet phrase be a easy providing of comfort?
Picture by Rhododendrites beneath CC BY-SA 4.0, by way of Wikimedia Commons.
