Prayer for Poachers and Parrots
Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner
(Inspired by and adapted from Bryan Stevenson,
“Just Mercy”)
When I left the base of the tree I had a wet face and a broken heart.
A man had died poaching a nest of scarlet macaw chicks. He had fallen,
killing one of the chicks he landed on, and her sibling was doomed to a life
time with clipped wings and spirit-breaking conditions.
The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had come once again like a
kick in the gut…
As I got up from the grave marker underneath the tree, I thought myself a
fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken....
I was breaking open, taking in now how my life was just full of
brokenness, as is everyone’s
I worked in a broken system of justice, where those with power merited
more fairness, freedom, and flourishing than those without.
The people I worked with were broken by malnutrition, poverty, violence,
corruption, racism, and classicism, and fatally flawed by the story that says
more for me means less for you.
They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, anger,
greed, and spiritual disillusionment.
The parrots I worked with were also broken; sometimes their very bones
when they were ripped from their wild nests by the poachers who will sell them,
exchanging a fist full of feathers for another of dollars.
I think of Rosa, a scarlet macaw with two broken wings and legs, suffering
when taken from her nest, nearly dead before she was one.
I think of Lole, a yellow-naped amazon parrot, a broken leg, cat
attacked, full of tapeworms, so weak, stunted, and unable to breathe I thought
she would die in my hands. She made it to one year of age, but I don’t see how
she will make it to two.
I think of Exodor, a black-hooded parakeet whose parents were killed with
their heads cut off over a toilet bowl for being carriers of Pacheco’s virus.
Exodor inherited the disease, with papillomas making his defecation difficult,
and his pain exacerbated by his constant masturbation on his food dishes, the
only parrot in his life.
I think of the poachers, broken by war, poverty, colonialism, and the
drug trade, and their children, stunted by malnutrition and stress, educated to
6th grade if lucky, raised by grandparents who did not go in search
of work in other lands, as did the parents
Entering the U.S. they are they are judged and condemned by people whose
commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and
prejudice….
It has taken years to sort it out, but I realized something about me and
the others gathered around the cross at the bottom of the towering macaw nest
tree.
After working for more nearly 30 years in Latin American conservation, I
understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary,
important, or will work.
I don’t do it because I have no choice.
I do what I do because I’m broken, too, because we all are, and the
system to at its very core.
Animating my body was a deeper knowing that came from my years of
struggling against animal abuse, oppression, poverty, economic inequality,
habitat loss, and a spiritual malaise in humans born of the false story that we
are separate or better than the others of different skin color, class, or
species.
Being close to suffering, death, guerilla war, executions, extinction,
and rape of earth and earth’s beings, didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of
others;
In a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness.
You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness,
oppression, loss of biodiversity, extinction, or injustice and not be broken by
it.
We are all broken by something.
We have all hurt someone and have been hurt.
We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not
equivalent.
I desperately wanted fairness and a chance for flourishing for poachers
and the parrots they brutalize, and the pet owners who are the end of the line
of a long chain of pain and tragedy.
I could no longer keep pretending that their struggle is disconnected
from my own, and from yours, and from all of ours.
I want the chicks of all species to grow into free flying flourishing
adults, though who knows how this is possible when others are hungry - the hawk
and the poacher takes the parrot chick to feed her own, or the pet purchaser
gets the parakeet to feed the family’s starved spirit.
The ways in which I have been hurt – and have hurt others – are different
from the ways Central Americans and middle Americans suffer and cause suffering,
and the ways predators hunt and consume prey.
But our shared pain, hunger, and brokenness connects us….
Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make.
Sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen.
And all of life is broken by rules we did not write that flow deep in our
evolutionary telos.
But our brokenness is also the source of our common connection to all of
life, to our animality, and to our humanity, the basis for our shared search
for comfort, meaning, and healing.
Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our
capacity for compassion….
Responding to the beauty that thrums through us all.
I heard of a minister that said before leading the congregation in song,
‘Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou has broken
may rejoice.’
Thinking of him, I see what our shared connection to all life is saying.
We all are broken, and beautiful….
Those who are part of the system that gives credence to the shameful
ideology that human worth and needs are greater than avian, and that makes it
possible to profit from birds in one way or another either as poachers, market
distributors, pet store owners, pet food makers, pet owners, aviculturists, veterinarians,
agriculturists and business people who promote sterilizing monoculture
practices, destroying the land for people and parrots.
I am them, I have broken and I have been broken.
We all are broken and beautiful….
As are the protectors, the stewards, the conservationists, animal welfare
advocates, parrot rescuers and liberators.
They too suffer the same bludgeoning blow that fractures the ties that
bind us to all life in beauty and brokenness.
Our tears beneath that tree are a cry to put down our hammers, our guns,
our credit cards, and our judgment, freeing our hands, minds, and hearts to
liberate the imprisoned, the caged, and the broken spirited.
In between the ground where bones broke and the sky from which beauty
fell, may you my dear parrots, always fly free, and you, my human companions,
let us walk together on the broken trail seeing beauty above us, below us,
behind us, before us, in us, and all around us, every step moving us ever
closer to cherishing our common animality.
Rejoice!
