Watch and Wonder - by Ragan Sutterfield (Paperback)

About the Book

How can watching birds deepen our spiritual lives? In Watch and Wonder, naturalist and Episcopal priest Ragan Sutterfield ponders how paying attention to birds brings us into encounters with the numinous. Sutterfield explores the spirituality of birding over a year of watching, waiting, and wondering.

Book Synopsis

Birding can nourish our spiritual lives.

Birdwatching is a delight, a deepening. It puts us in touch with the ineffable, and it draws us toward self-denial for the sake of love. Birding brings us close to hope, abundance, and joy. In fact, it looks a lot like prayer.

From having his vision opened by a rare flycatcher, to learning the power of naming while watching shorebirds, to forging friendships on a Christmas Bird Count, naturalist, birder, and Episcopal priest Ragan Sutterfield delves into how birdwatching shapes our souls. He writes of turning yards into refuges for birds on their long migration. Even as we reckon with the inconsolable grief of habitat loss and species decline, he writes, birds can give us hope amid the desolation.

Readers of Margaret Renkl, Drew Lanham, and Terry Tempest Williams will find a kindred spirit in Sutterfield as he explores, in verdant and lyrical prose, the spirituality of birding over a year of watching, waiting, and wondering. In each chapter, Sutterfield names a particular way in which paying attention to birds shapes our souls and draws us toward awe. Twelve virtues and practices rooted in the Christian tradition--including joy, attention, slowness, kenosis, and friendship--are nurtured within us as we wait and watch and wait some more. Watching birds, we move toward sacramental sight: looking at the visible to find the holy hidden behind it.

Winged wonders that delight and sometimes disappoint, birds are ever within and beyond our vision. Whether you are a serious birder with an extensive life list or a casual observer of hawks along the highway, this book is an invitation to wonder and awe. It only takes paying attention.

Review Quotes

"As Thoreau once said, 'Think of our life in nature, --daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it.' The bird, flitting into our overstimulated consciousness, is the perfect example; as this fine book makes clear, the chance to pay attention is a great gift." --Bill McKibben, author, environmental activist, and Schumann Distinguished Scholar, Middlebury College

"Sutterfield not only educates about birds; he shows how to think with birds. Ancient monks, distinguished theologians, and nature philosophers ride along with him on his feathered explorations into nature's rhythms and rituals." --Trish O'Kane, author of Birding to Change the World

"I feel like I have glimpsed something of God in the azure flash of a tiny indigo bunting and the sublime grandeur of a bald eagle's gaze. In this wise and inviting book, Sutterfield helps us understand the wondrous intersection of Creator and creation in these beings who defy gravity. Read this book to learn how to listen and look for feathered companions who teach us to lift up our hearts." --James K. A. Smith, Calvin University, author of How to Inhabit Time and Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

"I met Ragan Sutterfield early in my journey into wild church. He is a fellow edgewalker and pioneer in integrating the holy mystery of the natural world with the Christian faith. In this intimate book, Watch and Wonder, Ragan shares his experiences of the Holy through his relationship with a series of common birds, stretching the understanding of beloved community beyond those of our own church or our own species. These stories offer a gift of sacramental sight through the lives of birds as apostles of mystery while staying rooted in the sacraments of the church. Nature and Spirit are, in fact, not separate." --Victoria Loorz, author of Church of the Wild and Field Guide to Church of the Wild and host of The Holy Wild podcast

"As a birder, I loved Watch and Wonder. As a pastor, I found myself saying amen on every page. Through birding and its myriad of challenges and delights, Ragan Sutterfield guides us in patient attention and persistent hope, helping us listen to 'a quiet world ready to speak' and, in so doing, open ourselves anew to the voice of God." --Courtney Ellis, author of Looking Up: A Birder's Guide to Hope Through Grief

"For anyone who has been curious about birdwatching, Ragan Sutterfield's lyrical love letter to this pastime is a wonderful place to start. Beyond the inherent joy of seeing a flash of brilliant color at the birdfeeder or hearing the mournful hoot of an owl on a forest walk, the birds provide us with a way of paying attention to, and thus loving, the created world. May Watch and Wonder restore our amazement at the variety, beauty, and interdependence of creation--and our commitment to care for it as our home." --Katelyn Beaty, author, editor, and lifelong birdwatcher

"This is an extraordinary book. In Watch and Wonder, Sutterfield invites contemplation of God's wild, weird, and wounded world through the spiritual practice of birding. This is not a birdwatching book. It is an invitation to active and patient engagement with creatures of extravagant color and character in their individuality, as revelatory of the God who made them and us. Paying attention, lingering in astonishment to the point of love and solidarity with birds and their places in the world is the invitation the book offers. I especially loved that Sutterfield's Christian imagination, formed and informed by liturgy, theological study, and the stories of scripture, frames a seeing of both the glory and brokenness of the world through the lens of birding. It is as though birding also participates in the history of redemption." --Rev. Richard R. Topping, PhD, president and vice chancellor of Vancouver School of Theology