The migratory Swift’s vesper flight seems like prayer

My pastor recently gave a sermon about prayer. She said that there are many kinds of prayer — all equally valid. They vary on where they are given, the topic and reason and how they are given.

I think of a prayer as a form of expressing gratitude for being alive on this planet. But I have encountered other forms as well.

A prayer, for instance, can be a description of a high order skill applied to a specific purpose.

For instance, in her book about the circus, Diana Starr Cooper describes the acrobatic skill of Ernestine Stodelle, “Ernestine knows all about breath, about gravity, about concentration in a shaft of light, about strength.” This is a prayer about the celebration of a skill.

A prayer can also be a plea in a time of peril.

Consider the story of Fabian as described in Saint-Exupery’s book “Night Flight.” Fabian is a pilot trapped above the clouds and running low on fuel. The radio operators on the ground grasp the true significance because the flight of the aircraft becomes the flight of the shaman or the ascension of Jesus.

“Delicately they touched their instruments, exploring the magnetic sky, dowsers in quest of hidden gold. No answer? Perhaps they might yet seize upon its way a sound that told of life. If the plane and its lights were soaring up to join the stars, it might be they would hear a sound — a singing star.”

Swifts are migratory birds with long elliptical wings and a forked tail. They migrate over 124,000 miles per year from temperate zones to the tropics. They fly up to 105 mph and cruise about 70 mph. They feed on insects often flying at wave heights over the oceans to catch them.

One unusual thing about the Swifts is their daily flight patterns. In the evening they fly upward to heights above 6,000 feet. They sleep while aloft and calibrate their bearings by use of light polarization patterns, magnetic fields, wind, star observations and group communication. They also take similar flights in the morning. These flights are called “vesper flights.”

It occurs to me that the vesper flights are a form of prayer. A key part of the prayer is the attention they pay to each other. This communication informs them about the weather ahead and the decisions they make on travel directions.

In a universe where nature is both beautiful and terrifying, I think the essential prayer is one of thanks that we are allowed to live. But mostly we could be much closer to God if like the swift we paid more attention to each other and made collective decisions about our location and course in life.