The Cardinal

I heard a cardinal chirping in the morning and spotted him perched on the chain-linked fence separating the yard from the menacing-looking trailers next door. They, clearly ravaged by time and uncaring, stand in sick declaration of how lives gone off the rails might live.  I think they should be pulled away and burned, their land liberated from their oppression, but some are occupied and one in view through the privet sits empty.  The red-singing-glory sat on the fence, breaking my view of them and rousing a sense of awe in me.

Red-feathered-he had no prejudice of perch.  He lit on the fence much closer to the trailers than the cozy, sage house I was watching from.  

My God, your beauty is for us all.  It is found perching on the old and the new, the stigmatized and the glorified.  Beholding this scarlet-feathered-flame elevates us all. Your beauty and presence is for the reeking drug addicts, the demoralized among us who disgust with their behavior and waste, and it is for the sanitized, the rich, and the privileged.  It lights upon this green gable, the room in which I live, and offers the beauty of relationship, renewal,of communion and connection again and again in complete gentleness and humility.  You, God, have no prejudice while offering yourself to all.