Once only when the summer
was nearly over and my own
hair had been white as the day’s clouds
for more years than I was counting
I looked across the garden at evening
Paula was still weeding around
flowers that open after dark
and I looked up to the clear sky
and saw the new moon and at that
moment from behind me a band
of dark birds and then another
after it flying in silence
long curving wings hardly moving
the plovers just in from the sea
and the flight clear from Alaska
half their weight gone to get them home
but home now arriving without
a sound as it rose to meet them
~W.S. Merwin “Homecoming” from The Moon Before Morning

In late summer, the movement of birds above me has begun, like a prayer of promise among the clouds.

There are the noisy ones: geese, ducks, swans who can’t seem to travel without announcing it everywhere, like the booming basses from teenage vehicles speeding by.

Then there are the starlings and others who murmurate with wing wooshes, forming and unforming as a choreographed larger organism.

The quietest and most earnest are the gulls and plovers, some traveling only a few miles from shore to cornfields, and others traveling half a continent without resting. They direct their energy to their wings to silently carry them home.

Some of our prayers for a safe return home are bold and loud.
Others are expressed through feathered wings and forward progress.
Most are prayed without a sound being made, becoming a constant through the rhythms of the heart, a quiet recognition that our true home will rise to meet us when we arrive.

I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally.
I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.
~Madeleine L’Engle