“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.”

~ Rabindranath Tagore

Most mornings these days I leave the window open at night to welcome the wild, ecstatic hallelujah at the start of each new day. The song thrush first - actually a while before any light at all appears, and then the full orchestra: blackbird crescendoing with wren, robin riffing with chaffinch.

Birds sing before sunrise, I’m told, not because they are happy but because they have been woken by the cold and it is not yet light enough to hunt for food or a mate. They sing when they are constrained, cold and desperate - in anticipation rather than celebration. Once satiated they fall silent.

We are communicants in this mystery. Participants in this moment when the sweetest, most startling hallelujah arises - contrary to anything we ever expected - in the darkness preceding the dawn, in the shivers that yearn for a sunrise, the hunger before the feast.