When I was a child my parents took me on a trip to Greece. We were on the island of Patmos where St. John was sent into exile and wrote his Book of Revelations – a tiny island, one hill topped by a village of white stucco houses nestled beneath the stone walls of an old monastery.
In the evening we walked to a tourist café for dinner. As we made our way through the crooked cobbled streets I happened to look down to find a tiny bird, dying. I don’t know how it got there. Perhaps it had flown into a window or been hit by a car. There it lay, wings broken, gasping for breath.
Unable to leave it, I carefully picked it up and brought it to the restaurant. We sat outside in the balmy Mediterranean air and our dinner took some time to arrive. All that time I held the little bird and watched the final moments of its life. It was so tiny and fragile. A bundle of delicate feathers and broken bones, with miniature talons and a small sharp beak, which opened and closed in painful exaggerated breaths. There was no way it could survive and nothing that I could do to repair it. But I would not leave it and felt that I could at least witness it in its tiny lonely death.
In the Gospels, Jesus teaches his disciples, “Not one sparrow falls to the ground without God knowing.” The universe witnesses every moment of suffering, every tragedy, no matter how small or how horrific. What a great capacity the universe must have, that with thousands of years of suffering it has still not overflowed with feeling.
