JOHN DEMPSTER: The perfect world is not here, but it is coming
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I can imagine a child looking up from Scottish writer Kenneth Steven’s new picture book with its glorious illustrations by Laetitia Zink and saying: “But it’s not like that, is it?”
St Kevin and the Blackbird retells the legend of St Kevin, a sixth century monk in Glendalough in Ireland.
One day, as he is deep in contemplative prayer, a blackbird identifies his open hands as a perfect place to nest.
Such is Kevin’s connection with nature that he doesn’t shake the bird away, but remains still as eggs are laid, as mother keeps them warm, as hatchlings emerge, as fledglings take flight.
It’s a lovely story, a gentle book full of kindness, community-mindedness, love.
But that child might say: “It’s not like that, is it?”
And they’d be right: in the Eden of the book the whole creation exists in harmony.
Here there is no predation, no selfishness, no cruelty, no exploitation of the earth’s resources, no human brokenness.
Kevin’s fellow monks sit with him at night by the loch-side as his hands hold their precious burden, more alert than Jesus’s followers were as he agonised in prayer hours before the crucifixion.
As adults, we sigh in turning the pages.
If only the world were as it is here portrayed!
The immediate takeaway from the book is its encouragement to be kind: to one another, to the natural world, to any creature in need.
But more than this, its pages summon us into the quiet, the stillness of monastery, of loch-side, of Kevin’s soul.
How at ease he must be to hold his hands motionless for so long we think, we who in our edginess can’t keep still for more than five seconds.
The deep peace of Glendalough seeps out of these pages and into our hearts.
For Kevin, and for me as a Christian, the source of that serenity is Jesus, who did not flinch when his open hands were nailed to a cross so that deep peace can be ours.
And now Jesus patiently holds us in a nest formed by the palms of love until we are able to fly, and bless the world in our flight.
And, some Christians ask, would we ache for the lost perfection of an Eden, of a Glendalough, were it not that we have an inkling that things are not meant to be broken, that a better time will come?
And can we see Christ in St Kevin, holding the whole universe in cupped hands as the Dove of the Spirit hovers over her nest, ever attentive, ever watching for a new creation to be born?
So faith replies to the child: “No it isn’t like that. But it will be!”
