Sometimes the voice from the heavens isn’t what you’d expected.
The sound of flapping wings draws my eyes upward as I walk toward the old cathedral. Looking up into the brightening Seattle sky, with its grey stratus clouds thinning to reveal freshly washed blue, I see a trio of pigeons flutter from the graceful dome to a nearby apartment building. Where other birds wing soundlessly across the skies, pigeons broadcast their entire journey, from take-off to arrival. Why? Bird experts aren’t sure: to frighten off predators, or perhaps to flirt, or something more mysterious.
“Flying rats,” they’re often called, or “one of the most annoying things about living in a big city” — and that’s from a pigeon fan. They poop on city pavements and benches and your newly cleaned car, dine on the bounteous garbage of torn fast-food bags and toddlers’ snack crumbs, congregate in vast numbers on building ledges. To many, they’re simply part of the drab streetscape, notable only when a nuisance.
But today, as I watch them descend from the dome, the pigeons catch the breaking sun, and their iridescent neck feathers shine, tiny sapphire and amethyst flames descending from the dappled sky.
*****
A friend mentioned recently that he’d been walking, “busy and bothered,” when he encountered a random pigeon. “I’ve always thought of them as pretty boring birds,” he said. “But just then I saw this incredible iridescence and it changed the way I view them.”
Greg was reacting like a female pigeon. Those fiery colours are about attracting new attention and fresh energy, inviting intimacy. Just yesterday a loud cooing drew my attention to a neighbour’s roof, where a large male pigeon bowed and bobbed and fluffed those fine feathers for a smaller female. As he shifted his plumage, his beautiful colours flashed into a sparkling array that he hoped would prove entrancing. The female’s part in the dance is to evaluate whether his display calls her to this particular beckoner. As they moved closer, it seemed the answer might be yes.
Iridescence first lit up dinosaurs’ feathers back in the Jurassic, its latest appearance in a diverse array of animals ranging from jellyfish to beetles to snakes. The fact that it’s evolved independently among all these creatures must mean it’s a pretty valuable way to do colour. For instance, those multiple hues that change with the light create a sparkling effect that captures attention. Then, if you’re a romantic pigeon, you can point your iridescent feathers toward someone in particular, showing your interest in them with glowing colours while not antagonizing a potential rival who can see only your dull dark feathers. The shining colours’ brightness tells someone you’re healthy and would make a great partner. With all its messages, iridescence offers life-changing promises.
*****
“I will show you my pigeons! Which is the greatest treat, in my opinion, which can be offered to human beings,” effused Charles Darwin to his friend Lyell.
Darwin hadn’t always felt that way. Though his own mother had kept pigeons, young Charles was more interested in beetles and shells than his mother’s birds. But at forty-six, having just finished his extensive study of barnacles, Darwin was ready to turn his attention to a new project: the nature of species. He’d been mulling over some ideas since his voyage as third-choice naturalist on the Beagle, and it seemed time for a more rigorous analysis.
“How ignorant I find I am,” wrote Darwin, famous even then. With his characteristic, endearing intellectual humility, Darwin told his cousin William Fox that his goal was to collect all possible facts both for and against the mutability of species. Since pigeon-keeping was popular then, and he knew that breeders worked hard to produce birds with specific characteristics, and pigeons were readily available, he decided to focus on them. He figured the study of Columba livia wouldn’t take much time, hoping that simply reading and talking with the breeders would give him enough information for his nascent species project.
But reluctantly, he finally decided that truly understanding changes in pigeon qualities required breeding them himself. He wasn’t excited by the prospect, anticipating it would be “no amusement, but a horrid bore to me.” When that stance changed, it took a world with it.
In studying pigeons, Darwin was choosing not to be one of the cool kids. Respected naturalists of his time studied only wild creatures, looking down on farmyard animals as not worthy of the naturalists’ “contemplative philosophy” vocation. Darwin had spent five years on the Beagle examining the exotic, the unique, and wild around the world. Now a committed homebody, he turned his ever-curious mind to the tamer nature around his English country home. He built a dovecote in his yard, acquired diverse varieties of pigeons, examined their feathers, their feet, their beaks. Was this group’s rump white-spotted? What colour were that one’s wing bars? If you invite a dark slate-blue male to mate with a tan-and-white female, how do their children look? Those everyday birds transformed Darwin’s thinking — and forever deepened our understanding of ourselves and our place in the interconnected global community of life.
*****
Early each Sunday morning, a long line of people streams into the cathedral’s kitchen area for pancakes, scones, tea, coffee, served free for anyone who needs sustenance. Walking to the side door, I encounter more pigeons on the pavement, dining on crumbs left afterwards. I greet a guy sitting with his breakfast on the steps nearby, wrapped in a worn red and grey blanket. He looks up from his plate to smile at me and bid me good morning. Gathered at his feet, the pigeons cluck softly as they comb the pavement for morsels.
There’s a corner across from the church where I often see pigeons gathered by an apartment building. They convene beneath the stop sign, pecking at the grain someone has scattered there for them. The place is a vestige of hope, built in 1929 just before the nation was shattered and shuttered. Its rental photos show peeling paint and cracked ceilings — and outside, a pigeon arriving to roost on its roof. Whoever feeds the birds is pretty regular about it. I picture a gal about my age, standing on the corner, casting seeds for her flock as they gather around her. These days we aren’t supposed to feed urban pigeons, as many cities are trying hard to decrease their numbers. Yet I’m still moved by the pigeon-feeder’s kindness. All around the cathedral, stone saints and apostles watch as she makes her generous offering; I imagine their chiselled features softening at her grace.
*****
Dramatic organ music trumpets from the cathedral, scattering the pavement pigeons who add their wing-clapping timpani to the cascade of sound. I step inside the cool limestone sanctuary, where huge brilliant red, orange, and yellow streamers swoop down from the oculus Dei — the “eye of God” skylight above the big marble altar — in a blazing contrast to the calm stone tones around them. Today is Pentecost, the “fiftieth day” after Easter, which celebrates the arrival of a dramatic new energy to a group of Jesus’ friends. It’s an outgrowth of the Jewish festival of Shavuot, initially a harvest celebration and then a commemoration of God’s promises to Noah and to Moses. The fiery colours of the streamers dominating the cathedral’s great central space today evoke the dancing tongues of flame and roaring gale that galvanized the friends on that memorable day. Fire and wind: ancient symbols for divine spirit, a language understood by cultures around the world.
People stream through the aisle and side doors, taking their seats for the celebration. A lanky man mutters to himself as he shambles around the altar. Many in the sanctuary, including the priest, are wearing red, the colour of passion and flame, for this occasion. Others, like me, missed the memo on liturgical colour; we wear blue, green, yellow, pink.
As I wait for the service to begin, a winged form flickers outside, across the oculus, a wink in the eye of God. The high arches lining the aisles soften the murmur of conversations among the gathering congregation, so we sound like cooing pigeons who’ve found their way into the sacred space.
I love this cathedral partly for its medieval language: its multihued images, more than its words, are its storytellers. Pentecost’s symbols for spirit may be fire and wind, but complementing these is a silent figure eternally embedded in the eloquent stained-glass windows that surround me, transforming the city’s light in this sacred space. What I see there, in panel after panel, are doves: soft birds with quiet voices, who bring tender care and gentle truth, the things with feathers.
For more than five thousand years, in cultures around the world, the dove has been a messenger of the divine, and she continues to shine in this old church, carrying the long tradition on her capable wings. Ahead of me in the cathedral’s east apse, ablaze in the rising sun, is a panel whose thick coloured glass holds a yellowish dove, flying down as her small beak carries a leafy olive branch. Below the dove in the panel is Noah, whose haggard face shows he had almost given up hope. But his eyes have softened as he stretches up his hands to receive her priceless gift.
A different panel glows in brilliant tones of blue and white, green and gold: another holy dove plunges down toward the bowed head of Jesus as he is baptised. Each of the four gospel authors, whose diverse writing styles often feature varying stories in their books, tells this one story with a common key image: the dove who is a carrier of spiritual renewal. Luke, the doctor, precise in language, gives the Holy Spirit bodily form: a fluttering, breathing, live animal with heart and mind, so common in Jerusalem’s city streets then and ours now. Spirit incarnated.
And all four writers used the Greek term peristéra in their descriptions. A dove, yes, but more accurately: a pigeon. They’re the same species. With Luke’s image, I picture Jesus feeling the gracefully tapered wings brush against his cheek as tiny claws grip his skin. Perhaps he catches a glimpse of shining feathers before he and the gathered crowd hear the benediction of a heavenly voice, and the young man sets out into a transformative life.
So the white dove pictured in the cathedral’s stunning stained-glass windows was more likely grey, with flashing, multicoloured iridescent neck feathers. Just like the birds who hang out on the church’s dome; who pepper the pavements with their droppings; who coo to the tourists, the unhoused people, and the resident software geniuses alike; who fly with clapping wings that announce their exuberant presence to anyone with ears to hear.
Darwin devoted much of the opening chapter of Origin of Species to pigeons. He drew the origins of his English flock, and all those of his colleagues in Europe and the Americas, back to a founding species, Columba livia: the rock pigeon. Recent genetic analysis shows where pigeons started their journey 20 million years ago: on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, right where some of them were chosen by later-arriving humans as sacred symbols carrying spirit through uncounted generations. With human help, the birds’ range expanded from there to embrace the world. The glass pigeons illuminated by the morning sun in the cathedral’s windows, the storied doves fluttering through the fragile pages of ancient scripture, the pigeons who dwelt in Darwin’s dovecote and changed science forever, and those whose living feathers shimmer with dawn light outside the church this morning—all belong to a common family. These humble birds who share your city and mine have transformed worlds of both science and spirit, have brought transcendence home to roost.
*****
Toward the end of the service, the sun now streams from the south, bathing the congregation in a new glow through the stained-glass stories. I suddenly picture us from the oculus above, a bird’s-eye view, our individual plumage dappled in varicoloured light. We souls gathered in celebration, the vitrine doves in the windows, the pigeons outside, each person on the city streets: we are a sparkling glass flock. More than a kaleidoscope, we are a mosaic, iridescent, a set of living stories through which the light of the world flashes, rainbowed, in a call for passion and intimacy and a new kinship.
In my own search for meaning, I’ve been waiting for a dramatic visitation: a skyborne flash of light, a tongue of flame, a white dove. But perhaps my call will be a brush of feathers on my cheek, or the benediction of a cooing, clapping voice from above — through the everyday ordinary, extraordinary birds that spark with feathers of faceted fire.
