At a recent gathering for faith leaders, the host greeted participants with a familiar opening. “We know we are living in challenging times.” The room nodded. Of course we are.
Which prompts a thought: On what day, from today forward, will we ever say that these are not challenging times? If the answer is never, then “challenging times” isn’t a specific description of any moment. It is a vague gesture, at once comforting and distancing.
When church boards and ministry leaders open with “challenging times,” the phrase does something subtle but consequential: it positions us as observers of our moment rather than active participants in it. We acknowledge all the difficulty, gesture toward it — and in the gesture, we pull our hand back. The acknowledgement becomes an act of retreat rather than reception.
Perhaps we ought to change our posture toward what we keep calling “challenging times.”
Seamus Heaney’s poem “St Kevin and the Blackbird” tells a spare, strange story.
St Kevin and the Blackbird
by Seamus Heaney
And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
*
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
Kevin is kneeling in his narrow cell in prayer, one arm extended out the window. A blackbird lands in his open palm, settles, and begins to nest. Kevin feels the warmth of the eggs, the small breast, the tucked head — and in that moment finds himself “linked into the network of eternal life.”
So Kevin holds his hand out. Not for a moment — for weeks. Through sun and rain, through the hatching and fledging and eventual flight of the young birds. He holds his hand out until, Heaney tells us, he has forgotten himself, forgotten the bird, and “on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.”
Kevin doesn’t observe the blackbird from a safe distance. He doesn’t convene a task force on the bird. His open palm — already extended in prayer — simply becomes the place where something alive and vulnerable lands. His challenge is not to manage the situation. It is to receive it, and to remain present to it long enough for new life to emerge.
That is a different posture entirely. And it may be the one our congregations most need from their leaders right now.
We should note: Heaney doesn’t romanticize Kevin’s experience. The poem’s second half is unflinching. “Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?” Is Kevin in a state of transcendent grace, or is he simply in pain — arm aching, knees numb, body becoming a kind of raw instrument of faithfulness?
Heaney’s answer: both. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The prayer Kevin prays is not a recited formula. It is “a prayer his body makes entirely.” In Romans, Paul writes:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:22-25)
The apostle Paul and the poet Heaney, centuries apart, are describing the same condition. The groaning is real. The labor is real. But labor pains are not the same as defeat — they are the form that birth takes.
The alternative to “challenging times” is not toxic positivity or the pretense that leadership is painless. It is the harder, more honest invitation to ask: what is being born in this holding? What new thing is nesting in the very difficulty we keep naming?
What if church boards began their meetings with a posture of reception? Not “We live in challenging times,” but “What is nesting in our open hand right now?”
That reframe — from burden to birthplace — doesn’t deny the weight. It asks whether we’ve been so busy feeling burdened by our moment that we’ve missed what is quietly alive within it, waiting for someone with an open hand and enough patience to hold.
Kevin didn’t plan for the blackbird. He was already in a posture of prayer when it arrived. That may be the most important leadership insight of all: availability precedes opportunity. The open hand is not a strategy. It is a way of being.
We are, all of us, living in the time we have been given. The question is not whether it is challenging. The question is what we are holding — and whether we will hold it long enough to see what hatches.
When do you use the expression “these are challenging times” in your own life? What work does it do for you in those moments? What work does it allow you not to do in those moments?
In the Heaney poem, why does St Kevin keep his hand out for weeks on end?
What is the significance of Kevin’s forgetting self, bird, river, and river’s name?
How does Paul, in Romans, speak to Kevin’s situation?
How does Paul, in Romans, speak to your church board’s situation?
How could you start your next church board meeting in a way that opens the group to hear what Paul and Heaney are saying?
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