Bird Is The Word: Part One

Pentecost Birds

In preparation for Pentecost at my church this year, congregants were invited to help make 400 origami doves out of construction paper in a multitude of fiery hues- reds, shades of orange, and  shades of yellow. These would be displayed on a chandelier of sorts in the sanctuary on - June 8th (2014).


This is what they looked like - unstrung, as it were:

This was the brainchild of Kathy Stark, artist and fellow church member who has substantially "fired up" Riverside's Pentecost commemorations with awesome installations. There was a row of tables set up in the Bittinger Fellowship Hall. Those folding birds would start at the first  station - STEP 1- and continue to the next station and the next step until each bird was finished and could join the flocks forming in the basket. Once each bird folder had a bird done, they would circle back to the first station and start again. I managed to fold 21 of them.  Can you spot the ones I folded in the photos below? (Hint- the tails are slightly different.  Yes, there's one. There's another.  No, no- that's definitely not one of mine.)  

The Pentecost Birds in Flight

Sometime before Pentecost Sunday, they were joined by white doves which huddled together down the center of the "chandelier".  There they all turned and swayed in the air conditioned breezes for nearly a month and a half.  If my attention wandered during the service, I would watch the Pentecost Birds. The flock elegantly migrated together to the right, then to the left while each string of birds softly turned and swayed in their assigned vertical rows. They danced in time to the preludes, hymns, the anthems, the offertories, and the postludes or to the music only they could hear in their little paper heads.

From Pentecost Sunday on, there were signs that the "chandelier" wouldn't be a permanent fixture. Some in the congregation hoped that the birds would stay through the summer until Rally Day. But the Pentecost Birds clearly had ideas of their own.  They would shimmy down their wires and land on the backs of the birds beneath them, eventually crowding close together at the end of the wires. There they would sit in uncomfortable-looking clumps.  They looked like concert-goers crowding the entrance doors wanting to get in and get the "good seats".  The sexton reported that he would find birds that escaped their wires on the sanctuary floor. Yet, no matter how many slipped down and away, it seemed were more than enough of them left to dance above us through several Sundays.

And, then, last Sunday, they were gone.  Without a good-bye coo. Without a farewell flutter.

Symbolically, I suppose it was apropos. The Holy Spirit descended on Pentecost.  It didn't swirl decoratively above the heads of the faithful.  It wasn't content to dance on the wind forever.  The winds the Spirit danced on were the winds of change. And change doesn't and shouldn't linger in one place. Change is a word of action. In the case of Pentecost,  it sallies  forth and multiplies and spreads the Word.  

While I know the Pentecost Birds weren't Forever Birds, I'll still miss them and their soulful saltation.