“So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.”
Philippians 2:1-2
“Don’t you understand? The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light’s the thing.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
A Swoop of Swifts by Brit McReynolds After Philippians 2:1-13 The Spirit moves the way sound shivers in the gyre of the swifts whose air takes on a countercurrent light against the dusk that draws them there. It has been granted to you— to suffer such—as on the unrelenting wing the swoop both rises, and descends. You see, all the light’s the thing we’re trying to hold, and catch a glimpse of Heaven’s latent flare— a shining back as seen within the swifts all reeling in defiance of despair.
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The region of South Texas where I live is a birder’s paradise. People will travel from all over the country to get a glimpse of some of the rare bird populations we have in the area, and it isn’t uncommon to run into groups of birders with their telescopic lenses in the city parks or wandering the local University campus. While I don’t count myself among them, I have grown a like appreciation for our avian friends. Being on the border of Mexico, we live along prominent migration routes for many species. Fall, in particular, means the arrival of such passing neighbors, one in particular being the chimney swifts.
If you have never had the good fortune of watching them funnel themselves into a tree or chimney against the backlight of the evening, you’re missing out. They are loud, but in a way that makes the space reverberate with a particular lightness. There is a harmonizing fellowship, similar to the murmurations of starlings, in the way they move that I couldn’t shake from my mind when reading through Philippians 2.
“So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” (vs. 1-2)
What is it Paul is getting at? In order to understand what he is saying we must go back.
Philippians 1:29-30 says, “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.”
Paul is speaking of the fellowship of suffering within the body of Christ for the sake of Christ. As for my own life, it is in my suffering that I have felt nearest Him, and this ought to be a hope to all those upon the ash heap. That the God of the universe draws near to the brokenhearted is the greatest comfort in all the world.
For the Christian, this means an active rebellion against despair in a world that often indulges in it. Grief without hope lapses into despair. Despair is a fatalistic mindset that brings about the ruin of the soul. But we hope, not in our ability to lift ourselves by our bootstraps out of the mire, but that Christ has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves. To suffer for his sake then is a privilege. “It has been granted to you,” he says, and I cannot shake the words. They haunt my steps with a holy life making everything dead and dying green again.
I think of the swifts, and how to watch them is to catch a glimpse of the glory of God. Those soot covered birds flinging up from the coal-black flue make light and beauty out of their return to the dark hollow where they roost. How much we might learn of God by being attentive to creation.
In his book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis writes,
“Don’t you understand? The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light’s the thing.”
This participation in the Spirit is a shining back of the light of God for others to see—to move in one accord with the person of the Spirit and with one another and rally against despair. The world already knows it, though seldom knows where to find it—“all the light’s the thing we’re trying to hold.” In everything there is a trace of the divine. If only the church at large might remember there is only one story we’re trying to tell, we might offer something of that “countercurrent light” to an aching world.