Snowy Owl in Central Park - The First Since 1890

In the midst of our tumultuous world, something wonderful just happened -- a snowy owl appeared in Central Park's North Meadow, the first in over 130 years. 

Snowy owls live in the artic and winter down in places like New England, Upstate New York, and the upper Midwest -- but rarely do they make it quite this far south. You gotta hand it to this bird -- it not only chose the right city to land in, it also scoped out some of its best real estate.

In these troubled times, seeing something so rare and beautiful reminds me of the final lines of Brideshead Revisited when Charles -- divorced, friendless, lonely and miserable, stuck in the army during the dreariness of WWII -- goes into the little chapel on the Brideshead estate and sees the "beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle." For a long time this flame had been out, the chapel abandoned -- until one day it wasn't. Charles muses that, "the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones."

The message is that Divine Grace, the beauty of faith, has been restored, even during the most troubled of troubled times. And, in some ways, this snowy old returning to Central Park in well over a century, is a reminder that the natural beauty and goodness of our world still exists -- and it always had and always will if we work to make it so.