Feathers that Explain

Armodoxy for Today: Feathers that Explain

We continue on our theme of finding God in the little things, with this short observation from Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, having raised global awareness of political repression in the Gulag prison systems of the Soviet Union. Today, there is no Soviet Union, but there is tyranny, and political unrest in the human quest for freedom.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote this beautiful short prose poem dedicated to a duckling.

A little yellow duckling, flopping comically on its white belly in the wet grass and scarcely able to stand on its thin, feeble legs, runs in front of me and quacks: “Where’s my mommy? Where’s my family?”

… this one is lost Come on then, little thing, let me take you in my hand.

What keeps it alive? It weighs nothing; its little black eyes are like beads, its feet are like sparrows’ feet, the slightest squeeze and it would be no more. Yet it is warm with life. Its little beak is pale pink and slightly splayed, like a manicured fingernail. Its feet are already webbed, there is yellow among its feathers, and its downy wings are starting to protrude. Its personality already sets it apart …

And we men will soon be flying to Venus; if we pooled our efforts, we could plough up the whole world in twenty minutes. Yet, with all our atomic might, we shall never-never! — be able to make this feeble speck of a yellow duckling in a test tube; even if we were given the feathers and bones, we could never put such a creature together.*

Like the life in our breath, the cells of a trees, the splash of an ocean wave or in the feather of the duckling Solzhenitsyn describes here, everything is of God.

We pray, Lord, open my eyes and my heart so I may notice, feel, touch and appreciate the beauty you articulate in Your creation. Amen.

*Excerpt from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Short Stories and Prose Poems. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971. Bantam 1972