Connected Through God's Word

One of the blessings of joining the Mount community is that occasionally I am able to participate in programs at Sophia Center, a ministry of the Sisters where retreats, spiritual direction, and educational programs are offered. On Saturday, September 10, I attended a one-day retreat offered by Sr. Elizabeth Carillo entitled “Nature: The Living Icon of God.” This day also happened to be the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death.

Sr. Elizabeth noted that for ages, nature has been seen as a way that God communicates with us. I have found that to be true, and in addition, it is the way that my mother continues to be present to me after her death.

My mom and I didn’t have a great deal in common—for example, she never expressed much interest in poetry, whereas I have devoted many hours to writing it. However, we both had an appreciation of flowers and bird watching, and I used to fill her hummingbird feeder with nectar to draw the tiny birds to her kitchen window.

Every day I receive a poem by e-mail from The Writer’s Almanac, and the day after my mom died, the poem I received was Little Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond by Mary Oliver, which concludes,

As for death,

I can’t wait to be the hummingbird,

Can you?

Since then, I have felt my mom’s presence in hummingbirds, which particularly seem to show up at times of transition. For example, when I moved from St. Louis to Lawrence, Kansas, there was a picture of a hummingbird on the side of the U-Haul truck I rented. Since I have moved to the Mount, scads of hummingbirds have been feeding in the inner courtyard. One day, one of the birds uncharacteristically sat for a very long time at the feeder—no doubt guarding it, but also passing on the message, “You are here now—it’s okay to stop and rest a while.” 

At the retreat, Sr. Elizabeth noted that “Icons do away with the distinction between this world and the next.” My mom and I are still participating in the flow of God’s life, just from different places, and we are still connected by God’s word to us, the tiny but tenacious hummingbird.