Once while cycling through the warm Indian countryside, Carlos became aware of a strange stillness in the air. Nature seemed to have stopped, as if waiting for something to happen. Sensing danger, he stopped pedaling, got off his bicycle, and looked around. Suddenly he understood the reason for the eerie silence. In the low grass a cobra stood up with its hood spread and its tongue flicking. Carlos followed the snake’s gaze. It was fixed on the branch of a bush just ahead. On the branch sat a little bird, completely paralyzed. He writes:
Carlos decided to do something. He stirred the breeze with his presence. He tried to break the snake’s hypnotic hold on the bird by waving his arms. He shouted human sounds. Eventually his efforts were successful. Reluctantly the cobra lowered itself to the ground and slid off into the grass. The countryside came alive again with its surrounding sounds. And the bird, freed from its paralysis, found its wings and flew. It discovered its voice and began to sing once more.
(from Chapter 8 in Hudson’s Questions God Asks Us, “Do You Want to Get Well?”)
Hudson employs the image as a way of conveying some sense of the purposes of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. More broadly, though, I see it as a metaphor which captures the nature and essence of Christian “spiritual formation,” or sanctification:
though outfitted
with wings and voice,
we nonetheless
become grounded
and silenced,
mesmerized,
paralyzed
till Grace
jumps
and waves
and shouts —
interrupting
this lesser world’s stare —
breaking
our attachments,
our confinements —
restoring
our song
and our flight!