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February 22, 2013 Page 37
Preacher Offers Wisdom Borne of the Old Faith By Joan baum
Rob McCall’s Great Speckled Bird (Pushcart) may call to mind the New England Journal of Medicine editorials by Dr. Lewis Thomas, published as Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, which won the 1975 U.S. National Book Award. The Rev. McCall’s collection of sermons, essays, letters and musings, which he subtitled “Confessions of a Village Preacher,” ought to win a similar award and for similar reasons: it is beautifully written, a simple, elegant meditation on the human condition. Each piece, suffused with wide learning easily worn, modesty and humor, goes beyond its ostensible subject matter, often in surprising ways. This is an eminently readable collection, and McCall is a wise guide to our need for connection.
terms. The phrase itself, which appears in Jeremiah 12:9, is “speckled bird of prey” (itals. mine), but such is McCall’s doubting intelligence that he’s not sure how the reference should be interpreted. Who knows what Jeremiah meant, though, of course, “niggling literalists” who interpret the Bible with knowing specificity, think they know. Could the bird symbolize the church being persecuted by unbelievers? Or stand for a prophet, The Lord, the nation of Israel, a bald eagle, an osprey, a great blue heron, a turkey vulture, a condor or a black-backed gull? Could it be an “angel of life and death”? Or—his preferred take—could it be an object of Mystery, a sign of the power of Nature in all its beauty and death-dealing? McCall, a graduate off Harvard Divinity School and a long-time pastor of the Blue Hill, Maine
Congregational Church, is that relatively rare man of the cloth—a tolerant, inquisitive observer of the ways of the heart. He testifies repeatedly to a “raging” attachment to the world of nature and village life. He is extremely well read in the sciences and humanities, its record and promise of glory and sin. “Religious” would be an inappropriate word for him, “theological” no better. “I am no saint, no theologian, no prophet, and no expert on anything other than my own commonplace experiences….I yearn for no assurances of heaven.” He does, however, yearn for small town life and the natural world. “We dream at night of Spring; but still wake to Winter,” he says of Maine in March, a significant reversal of Shelley’s line, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” This is a fine book, and do check out that recipe for Kickshaw Fish Chowder (and cornbread).
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The collection is fiercely humane in its celebration of the individual over an organized clerical establishment. “I am not a Christian by any prevailing definition,” McCall writes in an introductory Letter to the Reader. He is, rather, a man of deep, abiding trust in the Old Faith—“the faith of our ancestors” that is anchored in “the fertility of the earth” and does not give men dominion over women or sacrifice children or animals to an angry deity. The “fundamental creed” of the Old Faith “is life, not death. Its doctrine is love, not fear….It wants a better present for all creatures, not just a better future in heaven for a select few who know the magic words and the secret rituals….We are what we love far more than we are what we believe.” The Old Faith is based on the natural world. Appropriately, seasons inform the structure of the book. McCall locates the Old Faith in the countryside, in “small towns, tribal villages and reservations all over the world.” It stands against the hard faith of urban and suburban churches that “adopt business models and language” and judge their success by the bottom line. McCall would call us to a “richer and simpler way of life.” If all this sounds a bit 60s or sentimental new age, it’s not. As a preacher, neighbor, friend, husband, father, McCall is deeply familiar with what Keats called “the vale of soul-making.” And his writing is so effective that he evokes trust as well as admiration. He doesn’t explain his title other than to write of the “great speckled bird” in ambiguous
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