We live between the feeding and watering grounds of migrating Canada Geese—one of many resting places on their way to the south. From early September until now, these birds have been an intimate part of our daily life. They crowd the skies, filling them with the pulsing energy of getting ready. We hear the sound of their calls and the rush of their wing beats overhead all day long, and sometimes even in the night watches. This amazingly dependable gathering of the geese, the great internal restlessness which impels all of these birds into this unifying journey, and this powerful instinct to move towards something they cannot see but which they know holds the quintessence of their livelihood speaks to me of the nature of prayer.
Imagine that the birds before flight are all the parts of the self. We have all of these varieties of impulses, all of these roles we play, all of these reactions, and each aspect of our self issues demands. There are the hurt parts; there are the parts that act like inner critics; there are the powerful parts that want success; there are the adult parts and the childlike parts, and there is the core of our being, waiting to take the lead. Our inner life can be rather raucous and disorderly, like a flock of geese in a field: messy, noisy, and quarrelsome. Individuals who come to counselling describe the parts of their lives as fragments and compartments. They talk about being at war with themselves or feeling so lost and undirected. When I hear this, I know what they mean. I resonate, remembering the inner turmoil and inner disputes which I have experienced. We humans know the energy of unrest which the gathering geese epitomize.
But we have not been created to stay in this fragmentation. Just like these flocks of geese, the depths of our being have been implanted with an instinct. Geese, in all their awkwardness, know when it is time to migrate. Something impels them to get ready, to gather, and to fly. In humans, this instinct is the image of God stamped on the core of our being. This image makes us “restless until we rest in God.” In Psalm 139, we read of the energy of the God of love tugging at this instinct within us:
O Lord, Thou hast searched me out, and known me
Thou knowest my down-sitting, and mine up-rising;
Thou understandest my thoughts long before.
Thou art about my path, and about my bed
and spiest out all my ways…
Thou hast fashioned me behind and before
and laid thine hand upon me…
If I take the wings of the morning
and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there also shall Thy hand lead me
and Thy right hand shall hold me…
For my reins are thine.
Our God is one who has searched us out and known us—who surrounds us and understands who we are. The God of all creation knows all the fragments of each of our beings and God is always gathering, seeking, and guiding. For the reins of our lives are in God’s hands. Thus, we pray because prayer begins before we begin, with the act of God creating us to move towards God and surrounding us with this energy of gathering and leading—of readying us for flight.
God is praying in us before we begin to pray, but we need to join God in that prayer. We have to respond. Like the geese, we have to take flight in order to move towards the one who calls us. To take flight requires faith. Most of us begin a life of prayer by performing the act of prayer; we aren’t flying yet. By saying our prayers and listening to the scriptures and receiving the Eucharist with our bodies, we are learning the truths of faith. What is offered to us is something external: physical forms of approach and intellectual content. These are very important because they create a map in our minds as to how to move towards where we need to go. But this intellectual content, these truths which faith proposes cannot be empirically proven or disproven, do not point us to a reality we can possess or control. When we pray in faith, we cannot depend on empirical results; that is not the point. When we pray, we want something that is beyond proving; we want the fullness of our life in God. Faith, claims Thomas Merton, by its very nature, will not give complete satisfaction to the intellect. Its purpose is to leave the intellect suspended (flying), knowing itself to be insufficient to the task. But faith, he continues, does not frustrate the intellect, nor destroy it or deny it. What it does is lead the intellect to a conviction, a trust that what is being offered by faith can be accepted ‘quite rationally with the guidance of love.’
We pray in faith, trusting in the guidance of love. Flying is like faith; it is to leap into the air trusting that you are intended to move through it and to be held up by it. The air that holds up the life of faith is the ministry of the Holy Spirit. In John 3:5-8, Jesus speaks of the life of faith saying,
Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
To pray is to let the wind of love carry you where it will; it is to fly. I want to note here that these are hard words. It seems impossible for a human to fly, and we don’t like losing control. Flying requires a letting go, a trust, a stillness which does not come naturally to humans who have come into much brokenness. But for God nothing is impossible. John 3 continues to tell us of God’s great love in sending his son Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, as God and man, comes into our humanity and takes us into his life, death, resurrection, and ascension—into his flight from God to God. Christ carries us to the Father in the wind of the Spirit. The art of flying is to acknowledge that we do not fly well or easily and to wait for the wind to do the work. Waiting on God is part of prayer too.
Canadian geese are most beautiful in their flight. But not in fragmented flight. A goose flying alone always looks and sounds a bit panicked. It is the unity of the great flock in formation which is the great glory of the autumnal heavens. The large V headed south, stretching out against the sky, all of them beating their wings in time with one another. In watching the geese this year, what has struck me deeply is the way in which an errant bird joins a formation. They do not always join at the rear, instead it seems as if their task is to move into the wake of the great V formation. Then, slowly, they are drawn into one of the lines. This integration is so fluid and beautiful.
This brings me to the final thing I want to say about why we pray which I learned looking at the migrating geese. Let us imagine all these birds as parts of our personhood: the part that was hurt by our parents, the part that loves to be the centre of attention, the part that worries all the time about money, the part that has always been insecure, the part that wants to be the smartest person in the world, the part that is soooo stressed, and on and on and on. When we pray, all of those parts exist, and we point the core of being towards God and seek to move with the wind that wants to carry us home. In so doing, we are attuning all of the fragmented parts to the God who is calling us into formation, into a particular shape that is who we are meant to be. This is a long process. One of the flock of our personhood will always be errant, but the V formation of the geese, led by the core, creates an ease, a wake of air which pulls each wandering goose into line with our being. It requires great energy and attention to stay in formation, to follow that pointing. But just like the geese, our lives depend on it.
Prayer is pointing oneself to God and moving towards God. It is moving in flight by means of trust, and in that flight, coming into the beautiful shape of our personhood. It is not simple. Some parts of ourselves will die along the way. The conditions will be very difficult, and the skies may often be stormy, but we are headed where we were always meant to go—and what is better than flying?
I leave you with a poem by Mary Oliver, who, in her love of the natural world, seems also to feel the pull of prayer.
Wild geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.[1]
[1] Mary Oliver. “Wild geese.” All Poems, accessed October 30, 2025. https://allpoetry.com/poem/15374223-Wild-geese-by-Mary-J-Oliver
