Smuggling Birds

Like many, I celebrate Church every Sunday at St. Starbucks, St. Barnes and Noble, or St. Borders. Sometimes I read the NY Times, or a book, or the weekend issue of USA Today. Sometimes I just stare at the cute medical students who invariably study from the second Starbucks opens to the second Starbucks closes.

Today I was reading from Eduardo Galeano, a jouranlist/historian from all over South America (though he was originally from Uruguay, I believe). It's a beautiful little reflection - and from where I stand, more moving than what's being said right now at 95% of the Churches around this country. It was written about a time in Uruguay when a dictatorship ruled the country very harshly. So I share...

The Uruguayan political prisoners may not talk without permission or whistle, smile, sing, walk fast, or greet other prisoners; nor may they make or receive drawings of pregnant women, couples, butterflies, stars or birds.

One Sunday, Didako Perez, school teacher, tortured and jailed "for having ideological ideas," is visited by his daughter Milay, age five. She brings him a drawing of birds. The guards destroy it at the entrance of the jail.

On the following Sunday, Milay brings him a drawing of trees. Trees are not forbidden, and the drawings get through. Didako praises her work and asks about the colored circles scattered in the treetops, many small circles half-hidden among the branches: "Are they oranges? What fruit is it?"

The child puts her finger to her mouth: "Shh."

And she whispers in his ear: "Silly, don't you see they're eyes? They're the eyes of the birds that I've smuggled in for you."