Listen to the Birdsong
Listen to the birdsong, There’s still something clear and clean
Breathe in the bright air, All is not lost it seems
I still wake up every morning, Cause an innocent man died
And I pray to know that innocence again
To come clean, come clean, come clean
That’s the first verse to a song I wrote several years ago. I hardly ever play it live, but it pops into my head a lot of mornings when I wake up to the birds singing outside my window. There are enough big trees around our house, and apparently the right kinds of seeds and worms to attract lots of birds. I know they like to eat my blueberries before I get a chance to.
But the birdsong, to me, has a cleansing effect. It’s a signal of newness. A new morning has come and bright voices declare its arrival. A thousand chattering heralds pour out a wild cascade of call and response in a language I cannot read and cannot help but understand. Like laughter, it is unintelligible and its power to delight is not lessened in any way for it – what you need to know, you know, without knowing much else. So the birdsong is the smile and laughter of the morning and communicates wordlessly, mercy.
Maybe these singers and their songs slept during the night. Well, they have endured the night, resting their voices for a time and a time again. Many things go silently about in their own heraldry and invite my voice into their ceaseless praise, but for me the birds, give voice on their behalf and mine – a music that washes over me as the light of dawn itself.
All of this seems an intercession embedding in creation, a groaning for the full enfolding of all things into the life that is truly life. What in this creation doesn’t pray? At all times all things exhale and exult. Even in suffering? Even in yearning? Yes, I think so. Yearning is its own species of reaching prayer – of searching praise. And though the pit does not praise, those at its edge and even in its depths may.
And to join that praise is to be washed. Not washed into the oblivion of naïveté, but into the light of God’s knowing and seeing love. It is to be naked and unashamed. To come clean.
Verse Two:
Tears with an old friend, Once all my lies had failed
I was surprised when, I saw that love still held
Cause I never had been truly touched, Till I learned to face the truth
God, don’t let me live a lie again
And I’ll come true, come true, come true
Jesus’s parable about pulling logs out of our eyes has fascinated me for a while. One thing that has occured to me as I’ve gone through some long years of log-pulling is that the process gives you a painfully up-close view of logs. You study the log on its way out. Every branch, every crack in the bark. You get a really good look at that thing. I get tired of looking at logs, and there have been times when tears helped ease them out from where they’d gotten lodged.
One of the things sin obscures is God’s love for us. The log is big, bigger than anything. Once it falls from your eye and lands on your foot, crushing your toes, the feeling is exasperating. But the Lord tosses it aside like a toothpick. There’s no contest. The Lord has never lost a caber toss. The crushing weight of shame can keep us from stepping toward Him.
I remember bursting into tears once in a car ride with a friend. We met one another in a shared place of despair and loneliness. Both of us separately had stood at a terrifying brink and had been saved from tipping over into it, but just barely. What a gift to discover the Lord gathering us to himself in that moment of frightening honesty.
Verse Three
Grandaddy’s greenhouse, When I was four years old
Still smelled like damp earth, From Garden’s long dead now
And I heard about a seed that fell, Dead and buried in the ground
But now the mighty bow to rest beneath it’s flowered crown
They come home, come home
They come clean, they come clean
They come true, they’re coming true
They come home
Some memories remain so vivid, almost tangible so many years later. I never knew either of my Grandfathers. They both smoked cigars like cigarettes. Both died from lung diseases before I was born. I know them only by contact with the things they made. There were the old dusty blueprints and sketches I found in my Grandad’s drafting desk drawer. There was his dressing room at my Grandmother’s house that was clean, but virtually unchanged. It was like a time-capsule of artifacts from his life. After college I found his ole pipe and lighter in a drawer and Grandmother let me have them. I have them still.
Grandad had a greenhouse behind his house. He had built brick raised beds and planted plum trees not far from where Grandmother and I buried a dead bird I found in her yard one day. She said funeral prayers with a five year old as we patted down the loose earth covering the shoebox – a cardboard coffin for a silenced song.
In the greenhouse there were barrels big enough to swallow me up had they been empty. Each one was full of a different type of soil. Little spades hung in their places, gardening gloves, stacks of terra cotta pots, hoses and watering cans were arranged around the little room with a big countertop for nursing seedlings. I loved to try my hands from barrel to barrel testing the textures of the different soils in my palms – the gritty roll of sand, the soft clumps of airy black dirt. It was like a Baskin Robbins of dirt flavors.
It was so cool and damp in the Greenhouse, and the coolness and dampness felt inviting. I imagined my invisible grandfather at work setting seeds into little pockets of soil, watering them, and protecting them from the harshness of the weather outside this little incubator. He himself planted now in God’s greenhouse. Planted like the Seed of Abraham was planted in the cool darkness of a tomb.
And I heard about a seed that fell, Dead and buried in the ground
But now the mighty bow to rest beneath it’s flowered crown
They come home, come home
They come clean, come clean
They come true, they’re coming true
They come home
Download the PDF Chordsheet and play the song yourself.
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