February 21, Second Sunday in Lent: Luke 13:31-35
In December, we lost our last chicken. Hestia, a Buff Orpington hen, had been part of our household flock since it began in 2012. We saw raising chickens partly as an act of civil disobedience: our town didn’t permit animal husbandry inside city limits, and we didn’t see this as a very just law. Our flock eventually swelled to seven, but between predators, illness, and animal control enforcement, by last spring we only had Hestia.
As Hestia and her siblings grew up, they looked for places outside the coop to roost. My fluffy, curly, shoulder-length hair fit the bill. I would be sitting reading in our backyard when Hestia would flap up to my shoulder and nestle in my hair. It was quite a sensation. While I wouldn’t say I felt like a mother hen, I did realize how instinctual it was for her kind to find shelter and safety under a “wing.”
Since then, I have heard Jesus’ avian simile in Luke 13:34 differently (his desire to gather the children of Jerusalem “as a hen gathers her brood”). But it wasn’t until I read Alan Culpepper’s reflections on this passage that I considered how Hestia’s death is just as evocative as the times she nestled in my hair.
