I chanced upon a bird cage on top of a pile of discarded things, among the broken furniture and the termite-eaten boards ripped from the living room wall during repairs. Somehow I had expected it. No childhood is without a bird cage. Mine had one, which I shared with my brother and sisters, and which housed a parrot at one time, a parakeet at another. And for our children, the wife and I bought a cage that had a roller, so if the bird could not fly it could at least run and hoot at the same time, like a train.
But birds do not last, and children grow up. And one day the cage will find itself cast off and abandoned, rusty, the lock gone, the wires broken.
I wonder what happened to the bird that inhabited the cage. I hope it was a magpie robin. This must have been years ago – the neighbor’s children are now young men and women and have their own lives. I refuse to think that the bird died inside the cage, although this was likely, with birds death often results from captivity – and neglect.
But it could happen that one morning in the far-away past, the neighbor stayed up all night, thinking that the magpie robin ought not to be deprived of its freedom, got up early and opened the cage towards the sunrise, and let the bird fly out.
And could it be possible that, after a few days, the bird returned, and from a branch of a tree next to the house, at the very moment when the neighbor came out for a postprandial smoke, the magpie robin let out a most melodious song by way of thanking the man who had given it its freedom, before returning to the wilds?
Somehow that bird would resemble the leper that Luke writes about in his Gospel, who with nine others was healed while they were going to the priests, to show themselves, as Jesus directed. Jesus was heading for Jerusalem. The ten lepers caught him as he was passing through Samaria and Galilee, and from a distance pleaded, “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!”
But only one leper, a Samaritan, returned, and, glorifying God in a loud voice, he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. For effect Jesus asked him where the other nine went, and proceeded to confirm his standing with him, “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you.”
In many ways, disease is a cage. It confines one inside the bars of debility, of fear and worry and unhappiness over one’s condition. As to the appreciative leper, Jesus healed more than just his disease, more than the sores and disfigurements of his face and members. Jesus healed his soul. He released it from the most fundamental of cages – self-importance. And the voice that came out of the leper’s throat, that spoke of praise and gratitude, may not that voice be the song that the magpie robin let out of an imagined evening, to thank the neighbor for healing it of helplessness and despair?
As a boy I would sit by my father’s fishpond and observe a slender, long-legged insect. It was light enough to stand on water. In time the stream would carry the insect away. But it would walk back to its original location, and there it would stay motionless and just go with the flow again, and, before it got too far away, return to its first spot.
Likewise, the insect evokes the leper who returned to give thanks. The flow of the water suggests the moments which bear the insect away, but always, the insect, if it chooses, can reverse the passage of time by returning to its first location. In an analogous manner, the leper transforms his physical healing, which diminishes with the day, the human condition being what it is, into something that endures. He does this through gratitude, through his thanks. And this, no matter how expressed, always aspires to the condition of a song.