Penance and Bird Poop
07/18/25 Filed in: Moments
One of my graduate school friends was from an old Boston family, and I have been thinking about an incident he described involving one of the older ladies among his connections. That branch of the family were high church Episcopalians, the sort that make the pope look like a backwoods preacher who celebrates mass in the first coat he pulls out of the box of rags he is collecting to clothe the naked in the mission fields. These people keep the best vestment makers in business, so all Christendom is in their debt. The trouble is that as they try to recreate the medieval church, complete with the Sarum Rite and special chants for Ember Days, they sometimes become a bit extreme.
It’s understandable. They’re overcompensating for belonging to a church that rediscovered all the things they like only after trashing them for a couple centuries. Anyway, my friend’s great-aunt, or whatever she was, got to reading up on the medieval church, which, as you know from your Chaucer, was a lot more fun than the Church the Tudors had bequeathed to her. Not that fun was exactly what she was looking for. She began worrying that just saying the General Confession and the Prayer of Humble Access along with everybody else every Sunday might not be sufficient atonement for personal sins. That became especially true after the old frank recognition that we are all miserable offenders whose vile bodies need divine cleansing was transformed by Prayer Book revision into something that sounded more, “Oh well, nobody’s perfect.” When she mentioned her concerns in the family, they wondered if she was going to ask the rector to start hearing confessions. Her response was that she had no objection to auricular confession, but as the rector was the most amusing gossip in the Back Bay, she didn’t think it would be for the good of his soul or her reputation if the practice were instituted in her parish.
All the same, she said, it was clear to her than in the early church penance was done individually and publicly. Her family didn’t pursue the topic farther and put it out of their minds until they began getting the phone calls. Why was their aunt to be seen every Saturday morning on her hands and knees scrubbing the steps of the Church of the Advent? The parish had staff to do that! They raised the subject with the old lady when they were next at the same dinner table. She answered, “I am following the practice of the primitive church and atoning for my sins.” Like the rest of his family, my friend was tempted to ask if the Advent’s steps were helping her work off any sins in particular, but none of them dared. Such a question would have been met with an icy glare and a reminder that there were a number of questions a gentleman did not ask a lady, and that while she accepted that among the fellows gathered round that table there were a number of miserable offenders who were not worthy to sweep up the crumbs under the Lord’s table, she would hate to think even one of them was not a gentleman.
The dear lady on the steps of the Church of the Advent came to mind when I began wondering if anyone was calling my friends and neighbors. I have been seen on my hands and knees cleaning the steps recently. But I wasn’t down at the Cathedral, whose steps would take a while. I was at my own home. Removing a pile of bird poop does seem like a thoroughly penitential act, and it is indeed a large part of cleansing any ecclesiastical portico. But I was doing it at home, and I was neither carrying out a penance imposed on me in the confessional nor even thinking (much) about St. Francis while I was doing it. It was not sin that got me on my knees. It was charity.
I realized some weeks ago that a pair of sparrow or wrens or members of another one of those deceptively cute species were gathering material for a construction project, and that the site they had chosen was the carriage lamp over my front door. I knew that a few visits to the job site with my leaf blower over the next couple days would put the kibosh on this development more effectively than a California environmental inquiry. But I recalled something about “the foxes have their dens and the birds have their nests.” Foxes have never wanted to the share the house with me, and I have evicted a groundhog and made a few possums feel unwelcome, but maybe I could make up for the Son of Man not having a place to lay his head—which is, I know, my fault—by letting the avian couple set up their temporary Additional Dwelling Unit over the front door. At least they would be safe inside the lamp. A pair of mourning doves built a nest on the narrow ledge over the door a few years ago without thinking about how big a young mourning dove can get before gaining the ability to fly. I rushed the fledgling that lay like Icarus on my front mat to the Animal Emergency Clinic, but they could do nothing, and I resolved to get out the blower whenever a hint of a nest appeared on that ledge.
But these were smaller birds, and the unit they proposed was inside the lamp—and, since I have replaced all the incandescent bulbs with LEDs, even when the light was on, it was
unlikely to roast them. They built a neat little nest. But it became messier and messier the longer they were here. It was the old story: once there are kids, people let the place become a hovel. The tumble weed hanging from my porch lamp was bad enough, but there were hygiene problems, too. I inspected the place after the first couple weeks of habitation, looked up, and asked, “Have you guys never heard the maxim, ‘Don’t crap where you live?’” I won’t say they said it, but their answer came to me. “We live up here. The crap is way down there, where you are.” So, as soon as I was sure their little ones had got their licenses and were no longer hanging around the house, I went into eviction mode. The structure came down easily. But, as I know from my experience of redevelopment projects, it is what’s down below that takes years to remediate. That is why, like a penitent old Bostonian, I spent this afternoon down on my hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water and a rag, trying of cleanse a little bit of this fallen world.
I’m just as happy that I was at my own front door rather than at a Gothic church porch or a Byzantine cathedral portico, but if I had to be assigned a public penance, this isn’t a bad one. There are appropriate biblical texts on which to mediate while you do the job. Matthew 23:31-31 is the first that comes to mind. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” If you want something Biblical that focuses on bird poop in particular, you can turn to the Book of Tobit, where Tobit’s blindness is the result the sparrow poop that has fallen in his eyes, aggravated by the ointments that the doctors prescribe to treat it. Tobit is a text that repays study, and who can’t be charmed by a piece of scripture that includes both sparrow poop and a pet dog? But it is all a little too convoluted to focus on while you scrub, and the sparrow poop sections, at least, have never been set to music you might hum as your work.
When it comes to tunes, Matthew 10 is the text to turn to. I can call to mind both a widely-loved gospel song and a track from one of Bob Dylan’s under-appreciated “Christian” albums. But thinking about them both makes me wonder exactly how I should understand the comfort they offer.
Every American, even those of us who don’t sing gospel songs, has heard Civilla D. Martin’s take on this passage in the setting by Charles H. Gabriel.
I sing because I'm happy
I sing because I'm free
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know he watches me.
Many people have found this song inspiring and uplifting, and the idea that God is watching over us should be comforting. But his eye is on the falling sparrow, so, I may be just a wreck like the little mourning dove I took to the emergency vet, albeit a a more valuable one, if in materials alone. That idea does not fill me with simple happiness. And the truth is, I don’t always feel all that free and happy. But I hum the tune in hope I will.
Bob Dylan read St. Matthew more carefully, and I hum him, too.
I hear the ancient footsteps
like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there,
other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.
God’s eye is on us when we fall, perhaps even more than when we fly. And doubtless he has his eye on those of us who are just cleaning the bird poop off the steps.
It’s understandable. They’re overcompensating for belonging to a church that rediscovered all the things they like only after trashing them for a couple centuries. Anyway, my friend’s great-aunt, or whatever she was, got to reading up on the medieval church, which, as you know from your Chaucer, was a lot more fun than the Church the Tudors had bequeathed to her. Not that fun was exactly what she was looking for. She began worrying that just saying the General Confession and the Prayer of Humble Access along with everybody else every Sunday might not be sufficient atonement for personal sins. That became especially true after the old frank recognition that we are all miserable offenders whose vile bodies need divine cleansing was transformed by Prayer Book revision into something that sounded more, “Oh well, nobody’s perfect.” When she mentioned her concerns in the family, they wondered if she was going to ask the rector to start hearing confessions. Her response was that she had no objection to auricular confession, but as the rector was the most amusing gossip in the Back Bay, she didn’t think it would be for the good of his soul or her reputation if the practice were instituted in her parish.
All the same, she said, it was clear to her than in the early church penance was done individually and publicly. Her family didn’t pursue the topic farther and put it out of their minds until they began getting the phone calls. Why was their aunt to be seen every Saturday morning on her hands and knees scrubbing the steps of the Church of the Advent? The parish had staff to do that! They raised the subject with the old lady when they were next at the same dinner table. She answered, “I am following the practice of the primitive church and atoning for my sins.” Like the rest of his family, my friend was tempted to ask if the Advent’s steps were helping her work off any sins in particular, but none of them dared. Such a question would have been met with an icy glare and a reminder that there were a number of questions a gentleman did not ask a lady, and that while she accepted that among the fellows gathered round that table there were a number of miserable offenders who were not worthy to sweep up the crumbs under the Lord’s table, she would hate to think even one of them was not a gentleman.
The dear lady on the steps of the Church of the Advent came to mind when I began wondering if anyone was calling my friends and neighbors. I have been seen on my hands and knees cleaning the steps recently. But I wasn’t down at the Cathedral, whose steps would take a while. I was at my own home. Removing a pile of bird poop does seem like a thoroughly penitential act, and it is indeed a large part of cleansing any ecclesiastical portico. But I was doing it at home, and I was neither carrying out a penance imposed on me in the confessional nor even thinking (much) about St. Francis while I was doing it. It was not sin that got me on my knees. It was charity.
I realized some weeks ago that a pair of sparrow or wrens or members of another one of those deceptively cute species were gathering material for a construction project, and that the site they had chosen was the carriage lamp over my front door. I knew that a few visits to the job site with my leaf blower over the next couple days would put the kibosh on this development more effectively than a California environmental inquiry. But I recalled something about “the foxes have their dens and the birds have their nests.” Foxes have never wanted to the share the house with me, and I have evicted a groundhog and made a few possums feel unwelcome, but maybe I could make up for the Son of Man not having a place to lay his head—which is, I know, my fault—by letting the avian couple set up their temporary Additional Dwelling Unit over the front door. At least they would be safe inside the lamp. A pair of mourning doves built a nest on the narrow ledge over the door a few years ago without thinking about how big a young mourning dove can get before gaining the ability to fly. I rushed the fledgling that lay like Icarus on my front mat to the Animal Emergency Clinic, but they could do nothing, and I resolved to get out the blower whenever a hint of a nest appeared on that ledge.
But these were smaller birds, and the unit they proposed was inside the lamp—and, since I have replaced all the incandescent bulbs with LEDs, even when the light was on, it was
I’m just as happy that I was at my own front door rather than at a Gothic church porch or a Byzantine cathedral portico, but if I had to be assigned a public penance, this isn’t a bad one. There are appropriate biblical texts on which to mediate while you do the job. Matthew 23:31-31 is the first that comes to mind. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.” If you want something Biblical that focuses on bird poop in particular, you can turn to the Book of Tobit, where Tobit’s blindness is the result the sparrow poop that has fallen in his eyes, aggravated by the ointments that the doctors prescribe to treat it. Tobit is a text that repays study, and who can’t be charmed by a piece of scripture that includes both sparrow poop and a pet dog? But it is all a little too convoluted to focus on while you scrub, and the sparrow poop sections, at least, have never been set to music you might hum as your work.
When it comes to tunes, Matthew 10 is the text to turn to. I can call to mind both a widely-loved gospel song and a track from one of Bob Dylan’s under-appreciated “Christian” albums. But thinking about them both makes me wonder exactly how I should understand the comfort they offer.
Every American, even those of us who don’t sing gospel songs, has heard Civilla D. Martin’s take on this passage in the setting by Charles H. Gabriel.
I sing because I'm happy
I sing because I'm free
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know he watches me.
Many people have found this song inspiring and uplifting, and the idea that God is watching over us should be comforting. But his eye is on the falling sparrow, so, I may be just a wreck like the little mourning dove I took to the emergency vet, albeit a a more valuable one, if in materials alone. That idea does not fill me with simple happiness. And the truth is, I don’t always feel all that free and happy. But I hum the tune in hope I will.
Bob Dylan read St. Matthew more carefully, and I hum him, too.
I hear the ancient footsteps
like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there,
other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.
God’s eye is on us when we fall, perhaps even more than when we fly. And doubtless he has his eye on those of us who are just cleaning the bird poop off the steps.