Summary: I didn't need a crow to tell me Dad was going to die. He had been in the sunroom in his hospice bed for two days, and he would be gone within an hour. The family had gathered and we were prepared. We knew Dad was dying. Still, the poetry of the moment was not lost on me. The crow was perched in a familiar poplar right at eye level and only a few yards away, just outside of Dad's bedroom window. I had walked into the room to get something for Mom, looked up, and there it was. It was dusk, and the low-angled light reflected off the crow's highly-organized rows of wing feathers. The long black beak was held slightly open, as if the bird were about to speak. The eyes were intelligent and hard. Before it set itself in motion, the creature looked as if it had been machined out of impossibly fine black-purple metal. After a moment, it spread its long black wings and rowed away in silence. An anonymous sixth-century Syrian monk we have come to call Dionysius once described God as a "brilliant darkness." This is an apt description of that crow--a brilliant darkness--and it made me wonder: does God, who we claim called light from the void, shine in dark things? Did God take the form of the darkest of birds, a living shadow, just to pay me a visit and remind me that such a thing is possible? Is this how God shows up? Today's reading finds old Job on the ash heap. He has lost everything. His children, his wealth, his health, his home, and his high social position have been taken from him in a very short time. He sits and weeps in an empty world, crying out for justice, for God to make all things right, for God to please explain how and why this happened. But mostly he cries out for God's presence.
