A little bird trapped behind a wire mesh is a poignant metaphor for those in prison, as well as those imprisoned by fear, illness or despair, reflects Patrick Gormally. A volunteer Catholic Prison Chaplain, he is a retired university professor and Head of Department of Romance Languages. He and his wife Marie-Cécile live in an Old Rectory in New Aquitaine, south western France.
One Friday evening in May a bird was trapped between the wire mesh and the stained glass window of the church opposite our house. At 7am next morning the wagtail was still flapping away at the top of the mesh, trapped two metres above the tiny gap where it had entered 18 hours earlier, without food or water, and that was a further two metres above the ground.
On tip toes my fingers barely reached the frame of the mesh, which moved: the lower iron clasps had rusted away. A slender wooden rod found in the cellar reached the iron bar higher up which separates the stained glass window into parts; otherwise, the glass would have broken, and I would have been in trouble with the mairie (Town Hall) a few metres away.
The rod jammed against the mesh frame which opened 40 centimetres, I was on my tippy toes and gasping for breath. The step ladder was somewhere inaccessible, it would have impeded access anyway, it was 7am and I was preparing for the prison service.
Before I had reached the front door, 20 metres away, the wagtail had found the way out: it had to fly down before it could escape, thereby using the laws of flight when one has wings.
Later that morning during worship the prisoners agreed that the bird’s tiny fragile sensitive feathered body had sensed the decompression, however slight, in the 40 centimetre gap in a wire mesh already full of apertures. That's Nature. They remembered that Elijah had heard a similar murmur when YAHWEH passed in the breeze.
They like escape stories and tales of conversion. We talked about Jacques Fesch (1930-1957), the last person to be guillotined in France, because in 1954 he had inadvertently shot and killed a policeman during the botched hold-up of a bank.
Whilst in La Santé prison in Paris he experienced an extraordinary mystical conversion. During the three and a half years of his detention Jacques Fesch more than expiated the unintentional homicide. His cell became the centre of a stupendous conversion for Christ, which he described[1] in remarkable Christian mystical terms. Since 1987 he has been a candidate for beatification in the Catholic Church.
The tiny, apparently banal detail, when the body is stretched to the last millimetre of possible reach, is a momentous part of the hope which comes to suffering mortals, like those in the throes of depression and who need to fly down before they can emerge. And those imprisoned behind walls for whatever reason, in relationships, jobs, addictions and in the absence of belief or faith.
Andrée, an old friend, was hospitalised in April following a sudden and dramatic loss of weight and blood cells which a myriad of tests failed to explain. Already of slight build, she descended into the fear of serious illness, cancer or worse, and was convinced she was going to die, as Ascension Thursday approached, the first anniversary of her sister’s death.
She is an artist who pursues beauty in music, painting and dance. In the student choral group in Paris many years ago the choir master used to call her mon petit moineau (my little sparrow). Her anxiety was treated with medication, she began to regain weight and her blood count rose. When no cancer was found, her voice gained a lilt, her step became lighter, and she suddenly began talking freely about the hospital and the new friends she had made.
That tiny “detail” of confirmed knowledge, at the end of eight weeks, allowed her to cross the abyss and had the effect, like the opening in the wire mesh, of allowing her trapped spirit, like the feathered wagtail, to move in the other direction.
When the doctors announced she should have a final PET scan, in case they had missed something, Andrée said that if a cancer were found, it could be treated, and nothing can stop her from tasting freedom and the good things in life.
On a recent Sunday, the Bible readings were Job 38:1,8-11 and Matthew 4:35-41, where Jesus calms the storm. Creation exceeds the creature whether imprisoned, ill or in despair. For the prophet, God is also in the heart of the storm, and He is not kind to Job who has no choice but to take it all in. Just as Jesus yells at his disciples, cringing in fear in the bottom of the boat, because of their lack of trust.
A tiny voice tells us that it is not the Creator’s fault: the answer comes from deep within ourselves. It is not the time to explain evil and hatred or the cause of depression and serious illness. On the tip of our toes, we push and resurface. Like the wagtail whose inner voice told it: “Fly down!”
Easier said than done. The French writer-priest Jean Sulivan (1913-1980) emerged from the closed world of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church and traditional seminary training. He went on to become a novelist and essayist in the 1950s and is recognised by literary historians as the post-Vatican II successor to the line of modern French writers of Catholic inspiration: from Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac, to Julien Green.
He had an original approach to reading the Gospel, and he shared with Meister Eckhart a Christian mystical frankness and humility in the face of suffering. Regarding detachment from the power of the ego to draw us into self-pity, he writes: “Stop torturing yourself, poisoning your own life ... live as long as you’re alive, do something, something absurd. Or better, who knows, if you’ve just had dinner, quietly do the dishes.”[2]
Footnotes:
[1]Jacques Fesch, Oeuvrescompletes, édition établie par Quentin Toury-Fesch, préface de Pierrette Fesch, Paris, Les éditions du Cerf, 2015, 588 pp.
[2]Jean Sulivan, Morning Light. A Spiritual Journal,(translation), New York/Mahwah, Paulist Press, 1988, p. 180.