By Blaney Pridgen

All writers in Op Ed are here to inform and acknowledge issues of importance to our communities, however these writings represent the views and opinions of the authors and not necessarily of The Advertiser.

​​Best of any song

​​is a bird song

​​in the quiet, but first

​​you have the quiet.

​​​–Wendell Berry

Most mornings, I arise just before or during sunrise.  Light begins to dapple the expanse of a big backyard cupped by a dense forest.  As the darkness makes way for a new day, the deep silence of night is populated with birdsong.  At first it sounds to me like a kind of cacophony disturbing the stillness.  Then the birdsong begins to blend like a wild Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  Out of the quiet it arises.  

I write this in the darkness of Good Friday followed by the stillness of Holy Saturday.  You are reading in Easter week, populated with the polyphony of alleluias, but first you have had the quiet.  Easter is birdsong after the dark nights of our souls.  

Have you ever been awake at 3 A.M. staring up at the dark bedroom ceiling?  Of course, you have.  We all have.  Some of us more than others, the more blessed, but all of us, nonetheless.  It is the human condition of consciousness, where fear or worry or remorse roam in the stillness and darkness like bats in our brains.  And have you ever also been amazed at how quickly that misery is dissipated by the morning, the sunrise outside the bedroom window where the birds are singing?  Those mornings, when the 3 A.M. willies are once again put behind, at least for a while, is the promise of Easter on this rough side of being alive.  And those birds are the angels outside of our empty tombs.  

Whatever happens to you today, go outside tomorrow morning at sunrise.  A promise is waiting.  The Kingdom of Heaven is like this.

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