“I slip my heavy feet into my sneakers. It’s not until I reach the end of the block that my lungs begin to open and not until the end of the street that I finally look to the sky. At last, at the riverbank I remember the birds. I sit and listen, picking out each bird’s timbre from the glorious cacophony: Butcherbird. Kookaburra. Cockatoo.”

Creatives know when we’re onto something. We may not know what it is we’re onto, but we know to attend to the stirring. It may be a churning in the gut. Or a lightness in our hands. For me it’s often something in my chest, like a giggle about to erupt. The about-to-be-ness of it compels me to explore. It’s not a completed joy but the beginning of joy, driving me to seek more. It sends me into prayer and conversation, experimentation and Scripture, through discouragement and confusion, to find the source. I only recently named this feeling. It was the writing of the passage above that made the naming necessary, especially the final words: “Butcherbird. Kookaburra. Cockatoo.”

These are birds I hear every day. So why did simply typing their names stir this creative bubbling in my chest more than ever before? There was the memory of the river, the bird songs lifting me to the treetops. There was amusement in the very sounds of these names, how they make my lips and throat dance, back and forth: labial, labial, guttural, guttural, labial, guttural, guttural, dental. I knew this delight could not be mine alone, like God had been waiting for someone to say the names of these particular birds, in this particular order. I felt God exult in the very existence of these birds, in their songs, their names (the first, very British; the second, from the endangered indigenous Australian Wiradjuri language; the last, a Europeanized Malay word). God delighted in my delight. And it delighted me that he delighted.

I can only call it worship.

I smile to remember my many grand gestures to get this feeling of connection to God. And here, this most ordinary of experiences had become something extraordinary. Just birds, just words, just me at my desk looking out at my own backyard. And even the work of editing the story, months later, stirred in me the same delight when I came to “Butcherbird. Kookaburra. Cockatoo.” Even the simple act of deciding that each name deserved its own full-stop. Even now, as I remember, the giggle is there, waiting.

In passing I mentioned my joy in these bird names to my friend, Kylie, a gifted ceramicist. We were sharing the moments of worship in our creative endeavors, so it seemed right to add, “Surprisingly, the most powerful experience of worship I’ve ever had in my creative life has been from writing the names of three birds.” Kylie was reminded of how she learned to speak in tongues, an experience I’ve never had and always found mystifying. She explained: “People sometimes talk about an ecstatic loss of control, but my parents taught me to speak in tongues by just letting me choose a sound to say when I don’t know what else to say. So I chose a sound, and I pray it when English words are not enough. Maybe these bird names are your words to pray.”

So I’ve been praying the names of the birds. When my mind has too many words to make a sentence, I pray, “Butcherbird. Kookaburra. Cockatoo.” When my soul stirs with a song beyond the range of my voice, I pray, “Butcherbird. Kookaburra. Cockatoo.” When my heart is weighed down, I ask three birds to loan it their wings.

Last week, in conversation with another artist friend, Meg, I shared my new way to pray. She smiled. By that afternoon, she’d written this poem.

Creativity is contagious.

Naming Birds
My friend says she prays 
by naming her favorite birds aloud,
and I think this is the most wonderful thing
so figured I would try it too. 
Goldfinch. Wild goose. Whippoorwill. 
Morning dove. Wood thrush. Waxwing. 
Butcherbird. Kookaburra. Cockatoo. 
It’s impossible to pray this way 
without smiling. . . .

Yesterday, I was living mostly in my head 
until a swallowtail fluttered 
past my cheek and called me 
to return. It was Wednesday afternoon 
but I was living ahead 
into some distant day with all its problems.  
Another man I love, reminds his friends
to seek the abundant gifts 
of the present. “Can all your worries add 
a single moment to your life?” 
Then he starts naming birds and pointing
at wild things too.  

“How do I stay in God’s presence,” he asked
as we ate roast chicken (that we did not make)
and potatoes (that we did not grow)
while sitting before box fans on our living room floor.
Then, as we do many evenings, we began
naming the gifts of our days and watched
the answer to this very good question emerge. 
Goldfinch. Wild goose. Whippoorwill. 
Morning dove. Wood thrush. Waxwing. 
Butcherbird. Kookaburra. Cockatoo. . . . 

Meg shared her poem on social media and sixteen people commented, listing their own bird-name prayers. Sixteen is not a lot of people. But on that day sixteen people stopped scrolling and smiled, remembered their favorite birds, prayed their names.

Creativity is contagious.

But there’s more.

This week, Kylie, my ceramicist friend who’d first seen how bird names might be prayer, shared photos of a work she’s begun: Church as Dawn Chorus (aka Butcherbird-Kookaburra-Cockatoo).

Kylie describes her work:

Mandy’s experience of sacred space and dawn worship in the naming of her fellow, feathered creatives, and Meg’s beautiful poetic response with her own heart-song, made me curious to discover what church-as-dawn-chorus might offer.

Even where church-stories are painful, unredeemed or oppressive (as they often are) and even when my clay skills feel inadequate (as they often do) the clay process speaks to me of renewal and hope. Our Potter-Maker-Healer-Lover-Shepherd invites people to Himself and makes use of his Body for His work of reconciliation in so many different ways. The experience of co-creating with Him to give form to these has been, for me, a process of pure joy.

Something has spread from me to Kylie to Meg and back to Kylie. (And perhaps there is more yet to be made. What is stirring in you? What bird names want to become prayer or poetry or pottery in you?) But I did not begin it. The Great Potter Poet had a love in him that stirred him to make. The about-to-be-ness drove him to make creatures with whom he might co-create, many feathered things, a pied one with reedy song, one handsome brown with a raucous laugh, one with a glorious, golden crest to unfurl. Did God know, when he shaped their bodies, how their small lungs would make a sound to fill my ears? Did he see how that delight would ripple out from his heart to mine, to Meg’s, to Kylie’s and to the hearts of any who come across what we’ve made? Are there delights rippling out through the centuries from every name of every creature in every language in all creation? “Curiosity” is not a big enough word for this needing to watch what shape the ripple takes in others. “Perseverance” is too dry a word to describe what I’m willing to put up with to see the fullness of it. And as beautiful as the word “communion” is, it’s flat in comparison to the way I need others to find out whatever this about-to-be-ness is about to be.

Creativity is contagious.

To learn more about Megan’s work: www.megantrischler.com

To see more of Kylie’s work: @journeysinclay.

Butcherbird: https://birdlife.org.au/bird-profiles/pied-butcherbird/

Kookaburra: https://birdlife.org.au/bird-profiles/laughing-kookaburra/

Cockatoo: https://birdlife.org.au/bird-profiles/sulphur-crested-cockatoo/

Mandy Smith is an artist, author and the pastor of St Lucia Uniting Church in Brisbane, Australia, and a DMin cohort leader at The Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination. Mandy’s latest book is Confessions of an Amateur Saint: The Christian Leader’s Journey from Self-Sufficiency to Reliance on God. Learn more at www.TheWayIsTheWay.org.