On Eagle’s Wings

My heart nearly stopped when Joe Biden referenced “On Eagle’s Wings” last night because that song has a unique place in my personal history.

When I was in the seventh grade, I attended a Catholic school in central Kentucky. At the time, I was very strongly Southern Baptist, but county schools weren’t great, so my parents tried something different.

All of a sudden, I went from church services held in a lovely but simple country building to attending school Mass in a vast, elegant structure built in 1816—the first Catholic Cathedral west of the Allegheny Mountains.

The walls of the cathedral were decorated by paintings donated by King Louis. There were quiet and seemingly mysterious areas full of flickering candles where little old ladies knelt all hours of the day to pray. I had never seen stations of the cross on the walls, images that provided a detailed reminder of the passion of Jesus.

The formality was so very strange to me. I didn't know what to do with the bowls full of water or how to kneel before entering a pew. The recitations and responses. The decorated objects. The robes. The robes. It was a different world.

After I had experienced enough masses to know the basic rhythms, my fear began to wear down, and I began to understand a different sort of worship.

Most of the religious experiences I had known before then had involved either the conviction of my gut or the cerebral processing of my mind as I followed pastors and Sunday School teachers methodically through the Bible.

The Catholic worship experience didn’t negate what I had known before, but it did expand a few critical areas of my engagement with God.

First, it changed my sense of connection with other believers around the world. I learned that the same liturgy being spoken by the priest I had come to love was also being experienced by other Christians living all around the world. Baptist churches are fiercely independent—at least they were at the time—so this was a completely new concept for me.

Secondly, not only was my geographical breadth grown, but my sense of orientation in the history of faith also developed. The same liturgy I was experiencing had been used for decades (though prior to Vatican II in Latin), and this helped me feel a sense of connection through time to other Christians from other ages. In the Baptist church, our hymnody provided a bit of this sensation, but because Mass was an entire pattern of responsive service, I began to realize how my faith was part of something far larger and older than anything I had understood before.

Thirdly, it developed my awe of God. I had felt fear of God before, as the Baptist church talks a great deal about hell and salvation. But I don’t think I had ever felt the emotion of “awe” until sitting in a Catholic mass. I realize that some of my friends feel uncomfortable with high church, and I understand why. It’s not for everybody. However, I was enchanted. There was a sort of poetry to sitting in Mass inside this glorious cathedral. A tactile reverence washed over me—a sense that God’s presence was as beautifully-other as it was terrifyingly-holy. I felt a thrilling shyness that was also full of longing. As an American, this part of my heart had never been touched before. I had respect for Presidents, but they were people we elected. We were their bosses, ultimately. A King—a high and mighty king— produced entirely new sensation in my spirit.

But what about the doctrinal differences?

Just like there are serious chasms between the Democratic platform and the Republican platform, there are intense chasms between Catholic and Protestant belief--chasms intense enough that they have led some to kill and destroy, attempting to gain power.

While violence wasn’t a threat during my time at school, there were certainly serious differences in our community that led believers to suspect and even despise one another.

I was a theologically precocious child, so I felt the differences as a nun taught our religion classes. However, my points of difference were warmly welcomed by my teachers. One even let the class know that they should all study the Bible like the Protestants. So even in the midst of this disparity, my faith grew, my love for those of other beliefs grew, and I grew to adore that cathedral. After I stopped attending this school, as a teenager, I would drive over to sit in those pews—surrounded by the sense that order continued amid the chaos—and that my King God was still big, beautiful, holy.

During the years I was attending Catholic school, in the midst of all that I am describing above, a single hymn became important to me. Of course, Joe Biden mentioned it in his speech last night, “On Eagle’s Wings.”

The words are from Psalm 91, and they tell the story of a man who is focusing on God’s ability to protect him in the midst of danger and chaos.

As I sang back through the words last night for the first time in over thirty years, I was so moved. The past few years have been brutal for me. I’m not going to spend much time talking about what I’ve lost because any conservative who has tried to be faithful to Jesus during this season has similar stories.

I will say I needed this reminder so badly. The old forms of shelter and protection I used to know are gone. I don’t mean that my political party lost. I mean that my political party abandoned itself. As far as I can tell, it is no more. It has morphed into something unrecognizable to me.

So here I sit, in a political space as foreign to me as that soaring cathedral once was, surrounded by customs that are terrifying to me, strongly disagreeing with some major issues, finding tenderness here and there, learning new things about new angles on the pursuit of goodness.

I can tell I will be a bit of a foreigner no matter what happens next.

But it hit me last night that we can grow in foreign places, too. Because my King sometimes uses strange and opposing environments to develop parts of us that we didn’t know needed expansion.

I don't know how God works exactly, but nothing could have been more meaningful to me personally than hearing this particular reference last night.

I felt seen by my King and loved by Him. I felt like He gave me a nod saying, "Becca, there will be room here for you to not only keep the faith but also to spread it." Thanks be to God.

“On Eagle’s Wings”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6tvLVmwQug

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord Who abide in His shadow for life Say to the Lord, "My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!"

And He will raise you up on eagles' wings Bear you on the breath of dawn Make you to shine like the sun And hold you in the palm of His hand

The snare of the fowler will never capture you And famine will bring you no fear Under His wings your refuge, His faithfulness your shield

And He will raise you up on eagles' wings Bear you on the breath of dawn Make you to shine like the sun And hold you in the palm of His hand

You need not fear the terror of the night Nor the arrow that flies by day Though thousands fall about you, near you it shall not come

And He will raise you up on eagles' wings Bear you on the breath of dawn Make you to shine like the sun And hold you in the palm of His hand

For to His angels He's given a command To guard you in all of your ways Upon their hands they will bear you up Lest you dash your foot against a stone

And He will raise you up on eagles' wings Bear you on the breath of dawn Make you to shine like the sun And hold you in the palm of His hand And hold you, hold you in the palm of His hand