If you live in a colder climate, you’ve probably experienced the phenomenon of stepping outside after a snowfall and realizing that the world doesn’t just look different; it sounds different. Snow mutes and muffles, giving the familiar sounds around you a quieter texture. Personally I find it exhilarating, as if the sky has been pulled a little closer to the ground.
The Great Gray Owl seems equally exhilarated as it patrols its snow-covered boreal forest in the northernmost reaches of the Northern Hemisphere — Canada, Russia, and parts of Scandinavia. This beautifully intimidating bird — the tallest owl in the world, at up to almost three feet — was built for this weather. Yes, we’re well-aware that owls have amazing eyesight; their haunting eyes are enormous enough to pull the faintest photon of light to their advantage (if our eyes were proportionately the same as a Great Gray Owl, they would be the size of oranges and weigh four pounds. Awkward). But what good does keen eyesight do in the polar dark of a Manitoba winter, when all the voles and mice you’re hunting are scurrying invisibly deep under the snowpack? As far as dinner is concerned, the owl is snow-blind.
But there are other ways to see. To quote Yeats, “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
Active Listening
The face of a Great Grey is like a DIRECTV satellite dish; in fact, it might be helpful to think of its facial disk as one big fluffy ear. The feathers are specialized to funnel sound to the two ear openings; on a Great Gray, the gorgeous black-on-gray concentric circle pattern almost looks like sound waves. Not all owl species have such a pronounced disk, but it’s a fair assumption that the flatter the face, the more reliant the bird is on sound. The facial disk is rimmed with stiffer feathers called a ruff, which interlock and channel sound, like cupping your hand to your ear to boost the volume. And since feathers have muscles at the shaft base, an owl can even change the shape of its face to better channel a particular sound that’s gotten its interest. If humans had this capacity to alter their faces for hearing purposes, maybe you’d finally be able to discern whether your spouse is really listening to you or not.
That’s not all. Like many owls, the Great Gray’s ear canals are asymmetric. The left ear is below eye-level, and the right ear is above it — a noticeable difference, considering how big those eyes are. This allows the owl to do vertically what humans can only do horizontally: differentiate the direction a sound is coming from. While we humans listen in two-channel stereo, owls can hear in Dolby Surround.
But wait, there’s more. Biologists have discovered that part of the auditory nerves that head to the owl’s brain branch off to the optical center. In other words, part of the auditory signal is processed as a visual cue. It appears that the Great Gray Owl can somehow see sound. To understand what that feels like, you’d have to be an owl, I guess. But a Dutch researcher named Kas Koenraads says that “Owls may actually get a visual image of what they hear.”
And one more thing. Acute hearing isn’t much help if you’re flapping your wings up around your ears all the time; it’s like getting a window seat next to the engines on a jet. But owls are famously silent in flight. The air flowing off the leading edge of an owl’s wing is broken up by rough comb-like feathers with soft elastic tips. The trailing side has a soft fringe to further dampen noise. These two adaptations give the edges of an owl feather a blurry look, and the Great Gray Owl has the most extensive combs and fringes of any owl. To polish things off, each feather is also coated with a fine layer of soft fibers called pennula that reduce friction and thus sound. If you’re trying to sit quietly in church, soft corduroys are quieter than parachute pants. Trendier too.
Despite all these benefits, it’s not like the bird is 100 percent silent. But tell that to the mouse. We don’t know what the acoustic experience of being attacked by an owl sounds like, but we’re pretty sure it’s the last sound you’ll hear.
So add all these traits together, and now picture yourself in the winter quiet of a snowy Canadian night, witnessing this perfectly-adapted predator in action. You watch as this massive owl turns her head slowly from side to side and up to 270 degrees around, adjusting the antenna for optimal reception. She locks in, pauses to listen, and then springs without sound from her perch to fly thirty yards through the forest in ghostly silence, to hover above the hard snowpack. From directly above, the “auditory mirage” created by the refraction of sound in snow is at its minimum, like a kingfisher’s pre-dive hover over a pond. The owl can suspend in place for up to ten seconds, her slow wingbeats barely registering a whisper — a ninjalike stealth. And then she drops, punching the snow with her talons to dive up to twenty-four powdery inches to snag the vole beneath with the surgeon-like precision — a vole whose tiny heartbeat she saw with her ears.
To quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” Or to quote Jennifer Ackerman in What an Owl Knows, owls “remind us that we are always perched on the edge of mystery.”
Seeing the Unseen
And so, speaking of mystery, consider this exhortation: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18) In the strictest literal sense, of course, this is impossible; how do we focus our corneas on something invisible? How can our retinas detect something that’s not there?
And yet a Great Gray Owl can see without eyes. It can look across a snow-covered landscape and see the heartbeat underneath. It knows there is life under the barren surface.
Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians are a common Biblical theme. In the following chapter he writes, “For we live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). And in his previous letter to the Corinthians, he similarly said, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Or consider the very definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Faith is a certainty of something not yet fully experienced. It is seeing without seeing.
That doesn’t mean the world is an illusion, as in Tibetan Buddhism, or a deceptive mental projection a la The Matrix. The world as we see it is very real and tangible. And yet we’re told that there is something even more real and tangible underneath it. This is a challenge to communicate, especially when you’re talking to the literalness of a child, praying with them before bed and assuring them that the God we’re about to talk to is here and he hears us, even when we can’t see him. In these fumbling explanations, I’m asking my kid to see below the wintery surface. To ponder spiritual realities. To engage the eyes of the heart.
2 Corinthians 4:18 contrasts the seen versus unseen with the words temporary versus eternal. Our moment in time, on any given day, is a fleeting experience, measured by the ticks on your watch (if you still have a watch that ticks). What we see is work to do, bills to pay, stresses to deal with, obligations to fulfill, chores to check off the to-do list. These are the things that beckon for our attention. We also see the welcome joys of life: the enjoyment of friends, the satisfaction of worthwhile work, the warmth of simple family time, a morning walk in the woods. These highs and lows seem disjointed, and we never know when we wake up in the morning what sort of assortment we’re going to get today. I picture a bunch of randomly strewn black dots…
But in my best, most spiritually aware moments, five parallel lines appear under those dots, holding them together, and I realize that these random moments are actually notes on a page, a sheet of music, held together as a composition, prefaced by a graciously sovereign treble clef and time-and-key signature to set the pitch and pace. It’s designed. It’s intentional. God is orchestrating something. Underneath the things I see (a hodgepodge of random little round circles) is a musical staff that directs it all forward, its lines and spaces giving meaning to each note. There is music underneath. God is writing something invisible with all the visible things in front of you. Do I see it? No. But maybe, like the owl, I can hear it — learning to see with my ears.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
Paul wants us to stay focused on eternal things. Faith is the capacity to see a promise-keeping God underneath it all, over and above it all, in and through it all. It’s looking at a bomb crater and seeing a garden, imagining what the redeeming work of God will look like when a liberated creation no longer has to groan (Romans 8:21-22). It’s looking at our worst transgressions and daring to believe that our savior would swap his own perfect righteousness for our filthy rags (Zechariah 3:3-4). It’s looking at a loved one and imagining them perfected in Christ, trusting the good work begun will be carried on to a gorgeous completion (Philippians 1:6). It’s the assurance that a believing friend’s cancer may be healed on this side, but shall be healed on the other (Revelation 21:4). It’s holding our breath in riveting anticipation when the angel says, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb,” knowing that the tenaciously complete intentions of Christ are about to walk down the aisle in perfected beauty (Revelation 21:9, Ephesians 5:27). This is where the musical score is leading.
Jesus conquered a friend’s death and said, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). Then he conquered his own death and proved it: “Whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” He calls us to believe in him, to engage the eyes of our heart, to see by faith. Under the snowpack desolations of this world, his heart still beats, and by faith so will yours. The realities of the cross and empty tomb are the lines underneath you, writing the score of your ransomed eternity. Heaven is “patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
We are always perched on the edge of mystery.
