The Kitchen Window
I lie awake, I have become like a solitary bird on a housetop. Psalm 102:7 NASB
Solitary – From the kitchen window of our home in Parma, we look out on the roof of the condominium next door. Nearly every day a pigeon flies to the corner of that roof and sits. I assume it is the same bird each time (who knows, all the pigeons look alike, right?). I don’t know why the bird comes to that corner of the roof. There isn’t any food there. It just looks down on the courtyard three stories below. But there it is. Like clockwork. Sitting. Waiting. All by itself.
The psalmist must have noticed the same thing. There is no obvious purpose for this bird to perch on the rooftop, isolated from other pigeons. Life hustles by down below, but this bird is disconnected. Alone atop his station, he must notice the activity but he doesn’t move. In real time, life passes him by. Just like me. Just like you. In those times when God seems to have walked away, life passes us by. We become frozen on our rooftop perches. We see the world—active, vibrant, expectant—but it’s not for us. Something has happened that prevents us from swooping down and engaging. Something sticks us to this lofty, lonely place. It’s more than the need for rest and relaxation. It’s forced emotional disconnection. Whatever is going on in the world below doesn’t speak to us anymore. In fact, we might even think that the busyness of that frenzied world is shallow, distracting, ignorant of the real pain of being alive in a world without divine justice. We might imagine that all those helter-skelter creatures are simply rushing to their own demise without knowing it. It’s so pathetic. If God has decided to abdicate, what is the point of living through all this tragedy, this sorrow? No, better to remain the solitary bird.
If only he could fly away.
Then we notice something incongruent in this verse, something that tells us this isn’t about external observation of the tragic human condition. “I lie awake.” All of this imaginative regret happens at night, in the dark. I’m not looking out my kitchen window in the sunlight of day. I’m in the dark—literally and figuratively. I can’t see what’s happening below. I only know one thing—one overwhelming, undeniable experience. I am alone! I am so alone that sleep isn’t even a friend. Like a solitary bird? No, that’s not enough. The imagery gets me started but as soon as I realize that even sleep can’t comfort me, I know the truth. “A man’s prayer is answered only if he stakes his life on it.”[1]
That’s the issue, isn’t it? Is my hunger for God so great that I stake my life on it? Isolation, yes, but even in isolation I survive. No, something else is needed. Am I willing—ready—to die if God doesn’t answer? Or am I just going to be the lonely pigeon on the rooftop?
Topical Index: solitary, bādād, alone, prayer, Psalm 102:7
[1] Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, p. 71.
