An old
legend has it that long ago, there was a time when swallows didn’t migrate
during the cold season. Every year, they had to endure harsh frost and snow.
Many birds died every winter. A kind-hearted man wanted to help them somehow.
He started doing everything he could to teach them. He pointed at the south but
the swallows didn’t understand him; he offered them food but they didn’t follow
him; he scared them off in the right direction but all his efforts were in
vain. So he asked God to turn him into a swallow. God granted his wish and
turned the man into a swallow that could think and feel like a human being. The
Swallowman easily explained his point to the other swallows and they followed
him in the fall.
That was
how the swallows started to migrate in winters. Of course, it’s merely a poetic
legend. Hopefully, it will help us to understand — at least to some extent — how
the eternal Wisdom born of eternal Love turned into a human being among human
beings in order to lead those who shiver from the bitterness of the earth into
the warm lands, into the Kingdom of God, where there shall be no more death,
neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain. Even as a
fragile human, the great Lord remained the One, Unchangeable, and Eternal — He
always remained the same God that He had been since the beginning, in his
boundless Kingdom and his unspeakable glory.
By St.
Nikolaj of Serbia,
Missionary Letters
Translated
by The Catalog of Good Deeds
CONVERSATION