[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The 401

Say "the 401" and anyone in central Canada knows exactly what you mean: the 
superhighway that stretches across the densely populated southern fringe of 
Ontario, from the Quebec border to Windsor and the bridge to Detroit. It 
goes smack through the middle of Toronto, and is the busiest and most 
commercially important highway in Canada. The province is gradually 
upgrading the entire highway from four to six lanes.  Through Toronto, it's 
already twelve lanes wide: six central express lanes, three east and three 
west, and three "feeder" lines along each side, connecting the central 
lanes with more local exits.

Since my son and his partner moved to Toronto, I've learned to cope with 
the 401. It's no longer intimidating, just a fact of life. I watch out for 
the vehicle in front of me and hang onto my place in the middle lane, 
regardless.  Sometimes the traffic is hairy enough to require extreme 
attention, but mostly it's just traffic. Coming back on Tuesday from a 
professional gig and a visit to the kids, the traffic was actually light 
and I could relax and give a certain modest attention to the landscape. Not 
that there was a lot to attend to, except for some rather interesting 
highrise buildings.

But then, just east of the Don Valley Parkway (also known as the Don Valley 
Parking Lot), I saw two birds flying south across the highway. Geese, I 
thought at first, from the body shape -- that curious rounded middle.

But are there albino geese? Couldn't be.

These were big, too, *really* big. There was something different about the 
wing shape, as well, and the flight was wrong for geese. Don't get me 
wrong; I love seeing geese fly, but geese in flight don't conjure up words 
like "formidable" and "majestic", and these birds did.

Swans. They were swans. A pair of swans, flying across the 401, all twelve 
lanes, right in metropolitan Toronto.

Some moments have a quality of eternity; they seem to stretch out like 
Silly Putty, and this was one such. I stared at the swans for a long, long 
moment (thank God the traffic was behaving!) wishing I could pull over to 
the side of the road and get out and watch them. I'd never seen anything so 
beautiful airborne -- their power and purposefulness, their strong 
grace.  Even blue herons couldn't compare, which is saying quite a lot, 
because a blue heron on the wing is an extraordinary object. Swans 
waterborne are pretty birds, but on the wing, they're breathtaking.

But the real punch-home point of all this moment was its sheer incongruity. 
If I saw a pair of swans rising up from (say) the Cataraqui Marshes east of 
Kingston and flying across the four-lane 401, I might be gobsmacked by 
their beauty, but I wouldn't have that sense of complete unreality. Water 
birds flying from one wetland to another makes sense; the highway is 
incidental.  But *Toronto*? Okay, that's silly. There are swans in downtown 
Ottawa. There are swans in London and New York and likely in Paris as well. 
Still and all, you don't expect to find them beating their way across major 
inner-city traffic conduits.

I thought about that incongruity. I thought about how incongruous it is 
sometimes to be a Christian in a secular society, especially a Christian 
who refuses to "do" battle lines with those with whom I don't agree. But 
also, I feel incongruous in specifically Christian contexts as well, since 
my faith is a rather faulty and complicated object, like a sweater that 
didn't quite turn out the way the pattern promised -- but it's the only 
sweater that seems to fit. I feel incongruous as well in my professional 
circles, where being a person of faith is not quite "not done" but is 
certainly heading in that direction.  One doesn't do it in public; it might 
frighten the horses.

I thought, too, about the hard and linear landscape, the width of concrete 
and the tangle of signs (including mother-hen admonitions against 
tailgaiting and cell-phone usage -- dream on, Toronto!). The 401 isn't 
quite like the mad tangle of interchanges in Montreal that always reminds 
us of a huge plate of concrete spaghetti, but it's still a space full of 
aggression and impatience as the hotdoggers weave wildly among lanes and 
the pods of big trucks chug steadily and ungently east and west, pounding 
their way, propelling the economy. These big birds, strong and powerful, 
are also vulnerable -- and wild, wild in a way that human traffic can't 
ever be.

But grace can.  That's the kicker. Grace soars overhead the way those swans 
did, even over the most unpromising and barren of landscape -- and grace, 
unlike the swans, can land safely wherever it feels like it, because 
nothing we can do could ever affect it one way or the other. Grace just 
*is*: majestic and powerful like the swans, but of a freedom even flying 
things could never begin to imagine.

Still, it was quite a moment: the first time in my whole life that I'd seen 
swans on the wing. I have to assume that it meant something; just what, I 
cannot begin to ask or imagine.