Lencten (Spring) Songbird: Red-and-White Hymn for a New Day

Note: As a way of concluding this year’s cycle of discussion posts, I bring this writing reflection on Spring into dialogue with a few thematically connected quotes from the seasonal posts of the past year.

Painting by my mother, Denise Leduc

The upbeat repeating whistle of a northern cardinal pierces the silent white backdrop of early March, initiating a kind of melting deep within my being even as the snow and ice hangs on tenuously to the land and trees all around me. Just a couple weeks ago the cold ice grip of winter seemed at its strongest in the depths of February, and yet the annual cycle of life in the north tells us to have faith in the shift that is about to begin with the coming flow of maple sap and the first tune of a songbird. This bright redbird on a bare maple is not waiting to express their hymn for the inevitable arrival of the greening saplings and first flowers but rather participates in those relations that are igniting the seasonal shift even as the white snow hangs around.

In the depths of my heart, I feel such gratitude for this first birdsong that begins to melt what has been frozen within me, and through their rhythm awakens me with Mother Earth. I am also thankful to the many teachers who have helped me to renew this primal wisdom of life that is around us always. From across the Two Row, there is of course the Thanksgiving Address of Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs whose words are deeply attuned to this cardinal hymn: “Each morning, we need to give acknowledgment and thanksgiving, as it is daylight again and we all have life.” As I slowly came to understand through supporting her writing of the book Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s, there is more going on in these “first words” than a simple cause-and-effect response to what our diverse relations give us each day. Through expressing gratitude, we participate in bringing forth the day and those diverse relations that makes our life good.

In a kind of chorus with Jacobs and the cardinal, I can hear the revivifying sensibility of my earth-grounded Catholic teacher Thomas Merton. As I wrote last Easter:

Easter Renewal (April 2024)

We are in a dance with the seasons of this life, and if our intention is spring-like renewal then the best we can do is find a way to actively partake in the changing beat. Both Jacobs and Merton remind us that spring’s renewal is a feature of each day’s cycle. “It is necessary for me,” Merton prays, “to see the first point of light which begins to be dawn. It is necessary to be present alone at the resurrection of the Day, in the solemn silence at which the sun appears, for at this moment all the affairs of cities, of governments, or war departments, are seen to be the bickerings of mice. I receive from the Eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word DAY, which is never the same. It is always in a totally new language.”

Even as the white blanket continues to cover the ground, this resurrection of spring is what the redbird sings forth. Arising in seeming unison with their hymn has been a fervour of red-and-white patriotism in the lands north of the 40th parallel. Unlike the songbird’s tune, this call of Canadians is responding to the threats of American annexation through the pressure of economic tariffs and perhaps, if given time, more intensive forms of political coercion. There is a dawning realization that the so-called “Liberation Day” of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is recalling conflicts which only months ago seemed like a distant memory, from the War of 1812 to the American Revolution to the preceding British American ousting of New France in 1763.

The tenor of this rising Canadian response is less song-like and more in the spirit of the metallic chirp the cardinal makes when a raptor flies above or predator approaches their nest. A threat of imperial expansion from south of the Great Lakes has initiated a kind of call-and-response north of this border: Buy Canadian, Canada First, “elbows up”, “Canada is not for sale”, boo the American anthem, don’t cross the border, and a host of chatter about reducing economic co-dependency by diversifying relations with those who hold similar values. But as we respond to the circling raptor, we must also truthfully recall our similar capacities for violent appropriation that is cloaked in the self-serving logic of the day, whether it be the Doctrine of Discovery or a Canada First slogan that mimics the self-conceited superiority of MAGA to the south.

Part of me cannot help but feel a resonance with many of these responses, but those resonances have less to do with red-and-white Canada First patriotism than a recognition of those imperialistic ways I want nothing to do with. The rumblings from the south arise from a desire for the resource wealth and energy found in the land. Water is also a vital concern, from calls to re-negotiate water sharing treaties to the broader global threat of appropriating continental water passage-ways from Greenland in the north to the Panama Canal in the south. Intertwined with these potential land and water conflicts is the threat to a host of social realities that many of us see as inextricably Canadian, from universal healthcare to various social programs to the post-WWII peace-keeping approach to military engagement to the basic sense of national sovereignty.

Image of Colonial Impacts in Canada Across Relations (T. Leduc)

As our red-and-white responses pierce the spring wake-up, it has also become clear to me that there is in this threat an opportunity for Canadians to truly understand on a visceral level the historic violation that is the source of Indigenous calls for Truth and Reconciliation. How many times have I heard Norma Jacobs speak about Canadian colonial practices whose aim was to appropriate land through undermining Indigenous national sovereignty and cultural ways?

When I was growing up, my mother always said that you do not go into somebody’s house and run through it, going into every room. You are a visitor, so if you want to play, you go outside. You need to respect another’s place… At the beginning of our Two Row relations, the ship had no foundation for understanding our ways. Those on board had a purpose for coming here and had no time to hear about the Longhouse or to establish strong boundaries and treat us well. The colonial attitude was that the sooner they got us disconnected from our land and culture, the better… From the beginning, the ship thought that our land was rich, and it moved quickly to take the nutrients out of E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’ (Mother Earth) by doing things like forestry, mining, oil drilling, and fracking. Our kids were sent off to residential schools or were adopted out to non-Native families, and certainly these experiences deteriorated the connection of our people to the Longhouse.

From my Catholic side of the Two Row, I hear some complementary truths spoken by Merton even if his 1960s terminology sounds a little dated:

We were the people of God, always in the right, following a manifest destiny. The Indian could only be a devil. But once we allow ourselves to see all sides of the question, the familiar perspectives of American history undergo a change. The “savages” suddenly become human and the “whites”, the “civilized”, can seem barbarians… The record is there. It is we who were the wanton murderers.

The spread of an American dream that has become nightmare for all except the most rich calls for a different response than us-them isolationism, bloated senses of superiority and the naïve belief in the manifest destiny of economic and technological progress. That which an era of inclusion thought was on the way to cancellation has angrily blown up into an expansive white male power that has been harnessed by the wealthy one percent. This greed-filled power grab in many ways feels like a caricature of those colonial roots we hold in common across our North American border. One of the many things I appreciate in Merton’s work is the way he looks deeply into the darkest colonial corners of his own Catholic tradition, recognizes the worst tendencies and then rather than cancelling the tradition within himself lifts up particular lineages that can inform a practice rooted in inclusion, justice and earth-connectedness. He models a different approach.

Economic and political coercion has a long history in Canada, as it does throughout the Americas, and this gives us an intimate way of understanding not only the historic roots of our present situation, but also what such a recognition can mean for how we actively engage times when renewal is called for. The cardinal song does not coerce a response from our earth relations, but rather co-arises with the emergence of budding trees, flowers and our own rise in energy. This sense of diversity in intertwined relations that commonly ground our lives is the core value found in the original friendship treaties of the colonial period like the seventeenth century Two Row and 1701 Montreal Tree of Peace, and if we listen closely to their inclusive spirit we can hear a song-note that can inspire our response to the existential threats and storms swirling around us today.

From Winter Solstice (2024 Post):

As with the Two Row, the Montreal Tree of Peace does not signify a transfer of land ownership as is assumed in the colonial and modern mind. Rather, they clarify our responsibilities to foster peace across human, ecological and even spiritual communities. To violate this agreement is to undermine the relational spirit of this Earth that is the source and sustenance of all our lives. This is what the colonial missions meant to unravel through subjugating Indigenous peoples and their wisdom for relating with this Earth… I love these forested winter lands, and yet can I love that which is stolen. I want to belong to my canadien catholic traditions and yet I also do not. “We have to start”, Merton says, “from our alienated condition. We are prodigals in a distant country, the “region of unlikeness,” and we must seem to travel far in that region before we reach our own land (and yet secretly we are in our own land all the time!).

The time from late-February through March and into early April coincides with the 40-day season known to Catholics as Lent, a term whose roots come from the Anglo-Saxon lencten, “spring”. It is a time marked by various rituals such as receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday, palms on Palm Sunday and throughout acts of prayer and fasting. In a way these acts close the winter season and prepare us for the Easter crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, though the truth is that my sense of those earthly connections only become more explicit as I deepened my relationship with Merton’s thought. The purpose of Lent prayer and fasting is, he explains, not a denial of life as I once assumed because of the heaven-focused asceticism found in many of the Christian teachings I learned as a youth. Rather, Merton writes that these acts of sacrifice and prayer should “lead to a positive increase of spiritual energy and life” so that we participate in the spirit of renewal that can be experienced all around us in this spring season.

The anticipatory spring hymn of the red songbird calls me to reflect on how my small “c” canadien catholic beliefs and ways can be seasonally re-attuned to this time of transition. A season of fasting and prayer can help make space for the birth of that which begins to emerge with the first songbird, the first flowers breach of the soil, the first smells carried in the warming air, and the energetic return of a spring to our step. But for this spirit of renewal to really inhabit us, there is a need to draw upon the best in our cultural traditions to help us clear out those socially destructive beliefs that we have long known no longer work. This intention is the focus of my fasting and prayer as I prepare for spring.

As with the cardinal we must recognize threats when they appear and serve our communities (local, cultural, global) with a piercing call of concern, but at the same time we cannot forget the vital importance of singing in a spirit of renewal. Any kind of protectionism ultimately must recall its broader purpose of serving that which makes life so vivifying. Song has a power to deepen community relations that is well known across many traditions. Research in the physical and social sciences are connecting this instinctive awareness to the origins of human language in collective ritual embodiments and vocalizations. As the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explains while describing the brain’s evolution, “Music is likely to be the ancestor of language and it arose largely in the right hemisphere, where one would expect a means of communication with others promoting social cohesion.” Here is the quality of communion that the cardinal’s hymn awakens in me, and through that rhythm I likewise raise a song of praise for this life, this earth.

From Spring Fast (2024 Post):

The beauty of spring seems so far away these days, even when we are living within the emerging life of that season. There is little space today for what Thomas Merton describes as communion… an act of relating where we learn more about ourselves through reaching into dialogue with the diverse realities of other people, cultures, faiths, races, and even ecologies. As he writes, at “the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. [And it is beyond social media.] Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity... we are already one. But we imagine that we are not.” From an Indigenous perspective, this is similar to what Norma Jacobs describes in her recent book as ǫ da gaho dḛ:s, the sacred meeting space where friendship treaties like the Two Row Wampum were collectively envisioned. What makes such a space sacred is the way people relationally embody values like peace, friendship and respect. In the words of Jacobs: “It is always about nurturing ǫ da gaho dḛ:s between us so that we can communicate with one another and be really clear about who we are in these relationships… As our conversation evolves, we can come to a real understanding of what the other means. This is what… is needed to come to ǫ da gaho dḛ:s."

Picture of Spring Flower by T. Leduc

We must continually recall why the birth of spring can almost effortlessly feel so good, even drawing from us hymns of joy, gratitude and celebration for the communion that is all around us, in us. In light of the deep ancestral roots from which our urge to sing emerges, it should not be surprising that music has been found to lower depressive symptoms, alleviate some effects of trauma, increase the white blood cells known to kill foreign pathogens and cancer cells, heighten the internal production of oxytocin that is connected with social bonding and stress reduction, and neurologically supports the uptake of spiritual teachings. As I highlighted in earlier posts, many of these potential healing effects are shared with research on fostering nature connection and spiritual practices like prayer and meditation. While all these practices (song, nature connection, ceremony) can and have been used for the objectifying motives and benefits of a few, their original potential to heal is rooted in the communion they each foster for reconnecting with the rhythms of this life.

An awakening into communion is what this dawning spring hymn opens us to as the maples offer their sap, the waters flow again, the first saplings spread a greening viriditas across the forest floor, and budding flowers like the crocus begin to emerge from the Earth. Each of those beings are part of a sovereign collective, and yet as with the original friendship treaties they work with each other to bring forward a renewed life that all can mutually benefit from in their own way. Renewing a practice like fasting has the potential to bring us into resonance with what the kairos of this time is calling us to clear from our minds and ways of living, to internalize those changes within the depths of an awakening earth that is our own bodies. It is from this clearing that prayer-like hymns for a new day, a new spring, a spring-surrection can effortlessly emerge in communion with so many other Earth relations, across so many borders.

Select Source of Referenced Guides:

Barton, Adriana. (2022). Wired for Music. Vancouver: Greystone Books.

Jacobs, Norma Gaehowako, edited by Leduc, T. B. (2022). Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s: Reflecting on our Journeys. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. https://www.odagahodhes.com/

McGilchrist, Iain (2019). The Master and his Emissary, New Expanded Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Merton, Thomas (1965). Seasons of Celebration. Ave Maria Press.

Merton, Thomas (1968). Ishi Means Man. New York: Paulist Press.