The funny thing about the blue birdbath is that I’ve never seen a bird come near it. The two barn cats love to lounge near it and often drink from its water. Maria bought it for me in Vermont a couple of years ago.

It has a spiritual vibe to me, and sometimes when I’m taking a break from my work, I like to sit on the back porch and look at the reflections in it, the birdbath is now surrounded by the beautiful flowers Maria has planted in the garden.

The birdbath gets me thinking and frees me from distraction. I think it’s a kind of guided meditation. In the warm weather, it’s a great focal point for mediation.

The birdbath exists mostly as a centerpiece now, a part of the garden, I love the color. The birdbath always gets me thinking about faith, it did today on my afternoon break.

I used to think that faith was irrational.

Then I came to believe that without faith, I couldn’t live a meaningful life, and today, sitting on the porch, I thought that the result of faith, the point,  is compassion, not reason.

Although I always struggle with it, I have come to see that compassion is faith for me, along with empathy, that’s where I’ve gotten, that’s the hole I keep seeing in the human experience – the dearth of compassion.

And it is the most challenging work for me; I fail more than I succeed.

Henri Nouwen explains eloquently why compassion is so difficult for me and others to practice and feel:

“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts,” he writes, “to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”

I love that. I even try to do it. I will always be working at it.

I have faith in compassion. Joy doesn’t simply happen. I have to look for it every time, and even then, I only find it once in a while.

Faith does not destroy reason for me; it fulfills it. Reason, wrote Thomas Merton, “is, in fact, the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.”

This meditation took me to Maria and her gardens, which surround our house. Everywhere Maria goes, life grows, from her plants to the animals to the flowers outside that so brightens our life in this season and place.

Is this why I love her so much? Because she is bristling with life?

When I ask myself in all honestly which person in my life means the most to me, I find that it is the person who chooses to share my pain and touch my wounds with a warm and tender hand, not the person who gives advice, offers cures and has the solution for all of my problems.

That is Maria.

Wow, I thought today, you must be a spiritual birdbath if you inspire all of this meditation and thought.