The Gift of Feathers: Nita Gilger

The Gift of Feathers

Nita Gilger

"Messages are all around us all the time
if we but have a moment to notice
and breathe them in."

Finding a Great Horned Owl feather is pure gift. There are many legends, and ancient symbols around this beautiful owl's appearance and its feathers. Yesterday, on my morning walk, Hunny the wonder dog, found a beautiful owl feather for me. 

It is at least 10-inches-long and gorgeous. It is now nestled among my rather large collection of feather gifts from other aviary friends. But owl feathers are extra special. Some Native American traditions, like from the Navajo, view the owl as deeply connected to the spirit world. It is said to be a powerful, positive omen indicating a message from the spirit world, urging you to trust your intuition, wisdom, and inner vision. The Great Horned Owl feather is a symbol of protection, connecting you with the unseen, and encouraging spiritual growth through the ability to see hidden truths. Some traditions say it signals a loved one watching over you. It is a connection to higher source. 

I do not underestimate this timely gift. Messages are all around us all the time if we but have a moment to notice and breathe them in. I love that our stories hold us, guide us, and form us. The blessing of our stories is that they make their home within the layers of our lives. Stories provide doorways and portals; passages and paths that point us toward imagining and creating anew. Our stories help us remember who we are and why we are. Our stories connect us to each other and even to loved ones who have gone before us and shaped our lives.

Sometimes the biggest blessings live in the story beneath the story. Inside our stories are meanings and guidance as powerful as finding a Great Horned Owl feather that points us to a somewhat mystical longing and helpful wisdom. All of those gifts are within us and around us all the time. We simply need to be reminded of those stories and God's messages to us. 

Henri Nouwen said, "Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us." 

 Nehemiah 8:10 says, "The joy of the Lord is your strength."

The world is not perfect and neither am I, but in it all, I hope I can draw strength from the joy of the Lord and the wisdom of nature which is the very Spirit of God itself. Amen.

Does God Send Us Messages?

Butterflies, Owls, and Meaningful Coincidences

Many people have had experiences in nature that feel strangely meaningful. Someone grieving the loss of a grandparent suddenly notices a butterfly landing nearby and feels comforted. Someone going through confusion or sadness finds the feather of a great horned owl on a forest trail and senses the moment carries meaning beyond accident. Others speak of hawks appearing at turning points in life or deer crossing their paths during moments of deep reflection.

Experiences like these happen often enough that people quietly wonder: Does the universe - does God - sometimes communicate through the natural world?

I want to answer this question in the affirmative. Yes, I believe that God, understood as the living uniy of the universe, does communicate through creatures in the natural world and our interactions with them, Owls and butterflies, for example. And owl feathers, too, as Nita Gilger's reflection so beautifully shows.

But first I must ask you to discard two views that may already be shaping your imagination.

Two Views to Set Aside

First, please discard the idea that God is a supernatural agent cut off from the world, observing it from a distance and occasionally intervening in unilateral or manipulative ways—engineering events from the outside and then withdrawing again. I do not mean that God sends messages in that way.

Second, please discard the idea that the universe is nothing more than a gigantic machine whose fundamental building blocks are inert objects—atoms and molecules colliding with one another without feeling, interiority, or self-creativity of their own. That view naturally leads many people to say: “Of course God does not send messages through nature. The world is not enchanted in that way.” Indeed, that outlook may lead people to doubt whether there is any sacred reality at all.

I ask you to set aside both of these pictures and imagine something different.

God as the Living Whole of the universe

Try thinking of the universe as a living organism in its own right: a vast Consciousness, if you will, that subjectively unifies or prehends the entirety of the universe, not unlike the way you yourself, in the immediacy of this moment, prehend and thus bring together the many things you are experiencing: sounds, colors, memories, bodily feelings, hopes, anxieties, and possibilities. In this view, the universe is not a mere collection of external objects spread across space. It is an ongoing act of experience, a living whole in which all things are internally related, felt, and gathered into a wider unity. The entire universe, as it unfolds, is the body of this life.

Think of this living whole of the universe as God. On this view, God is the living whole, the Consciousness, in whom the universe lives and moves and has is being. And the many entities composing the universe - microscopic, macroscopic, and galactic - are God's body.

God as Love

Imagine further, with open and relational (process) theologians, that this living whole of the universe has something like love as its very essence. It is not unlimited in power; things can happen in the universe that it does not will. But it is unlimited in love. It is, to use the language of the theologian Thomas Oord, amipotent.

Imagine still further that, by virtue of its limitless love, and also by virtue of the power or agency that worldly creatures have, it does not and cannot influence the world through coercion, manipulation, or one-sided interruption, but through the offering of fresh and animating possibilities for life and becoming. This offering of fresh and animating possibilities is one expression of its love. The other expression is its ongoing act of feeling the feelings of all creatures, all the time, with tenderness.

God as Working through Initial Aims

Process philosophy calls these possibilities “initial aims.” They are invitations toward richer forms of experience, greater intensity of life, beauty, harmony, connection, healing, courage, wisdom, or peace. Creatures may or may not respond to these invitations, because each creature has its own measure of self-creativity and freedom. But when these possibilities are received and embodied, they can help bring fulfillment to the creature at hand in the situation at hand.

God as Coordinating Initial Aims

Further imagine that this spirit works not only with individuals, but also relationally and coordinatively—seeking, as best as possible, to weave together the lives of creatures into patterns of mutual enrichment. The spirit does not merely offer isolated possibilities to isolated beings. It seeks to coordinate possibilities so that the flourishing of one creature resonates with the flourishing of others. A river nourishes a forest. A forest shelters animals. Animals disperse seeds. Human beings find healing in contact with the natural world. The universe becomes, at its best, a web of interdependent fulfillment rather than a collection of disconnected events.

In process philosophy, this does not mean that harmony is imposed from above. Every creature retains its own self-creativity and freedom of response, which means that fragmentation, conflict, and tragedy remain real possibilities. But the sacred spirit at work in the universe continuously lures the world toward forms of harmony, beauty, intensity, and connection that include rather than erase diversity. Whitehead spoke of the universe as moving toward a “harmony of harmonies.”

Jung and the Synchronicity of Aims

In such a universe, what Carl Jung called “meaningful coincidences” or “synchronicities” may sometimes occur. Jung used these terms to describe moments in which outward events and inward feelings unexpectedly converge in ways that feel deeply significant.

From a process perspective, these moments need not be understood as magical interruptions of nature, nor merely as random accidents onto which human beings project meaning. They may instead reflect occasions in which the coordinating activity of the sacred spirit becomes briefly visible within the relational fabric of life itself.

The Universe sends a Message!

And this leads back to the original question.

Might this spirit be quietly at work in the life of a grieving or searching person? Might the inward leadings of the living whole of the universe resonate with outward events in the natural world? Might a butterfly landing nearby, an owl feather discovered on a trail, or a hawk circling overhead become part of a meaningful pattern through which comfort, insight, guidance, or healing emerges?

A process theologian will answer yes. Not because God is controlling nature like a puppeteer, and not because butterflies or feathers are entities dropped from heaven, but because the universe itself is relational, alive, responsive, and filled with possibilities for meaningful connection, partly coordinated by the living whole of the universe itself, that is, by God.

When the butterfly appears on the table, it can indeed be a message. The meaning of the message lies not in the butterfly alone and the consolation it offers, or in the person who experiences the butterfly and experiences that consolation, but in the relationship between them, as felt by the one who is consoled.

In short, the universe sends her a message!

Was the butterfly lured by the Spirit?

This way of thinking naturally raises further questions. Was the butterfly itself literally lured by the sacred spirit to fly to that exact place at that exact moment in order to become present to the grieving person? And might the butterfly somehow embody or carry the presence of a departed loved one for a brief moment in time?

These are questions to which process philosophy and theology do not offer definitive answers. But they are not ruled out in advance, either. In process thought, the universe is alive all the way down. The sacred spirit is at work not only in human beings but throughout the natural world, continuously offering possibilities to creatures according to their own capacities and forms of experience. It is therefore possible that, as the spirit is at work in the butterfly in terms proper to butterfly life, it may also be at work in ways that enable the butterfly to become a healing or comforting presence for a grieving person. The butterfly remains fully itself, yet its appearance may participate in a larger relational pattern of meaning. Thus the butterfly becomes an ambassador for divine love.

Can deceased be present in butterflies?

Process philosophy also leaves open another possibility. Because the mind or soul of a living being is not understood as reducible to the physical body or central nervous system alone, it remains possible that some form of postmortem experience or continuing presence exists. It is therefore possible—though certainly not provable—that a deceased loved one could in some way become present through an animal, a dream, a memory, or another event in the natural world for a brief period of time.

Process philosophy and theology do not claim certainty about such matters, nor do they seek to turn them into rigid doctrines. Instead, they leave these possibilities open—to the experiences of those involved, to personal discernment, and to further empirical and spiritual exploration. What they reject is the assumption that the universe is spiritually empty or closed to meaningful forms of connection between the visible and invisible dimensions of life.

Paying Attention Again

The butterfly still follows the rhythms of nature. The owl still loses its feather naturally. The deer still walks its ordinary path through the woods. Yet these events can become spiritually meaningful because the world is not spiritually empty. The sacred is present within it, luring life toward connection, beauty, meaning, and transformation.

Perhaps, then, spiritual life partly involves learning how to pay attention again—to the subtle resonances between our inner lives and the living world around us. In moments like these, the universe may feel enchanted once more—not because natural laws have been suspended, but because the deeper relational beauty of existence briefly shines through ordinary experience.

We may understandably wonder why all moments do not include messages. Perhaps they do. That is a teaching in Islam. It is the idea that anything that happens, and everything that happens, is a sign of God. In a process perspective, this need not mean that all events are willed by God. But it can mean that all events can teach us something important, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear, Auspicious moments in which butteeflies appear are expressions of, not exceptions to, a general revelation that is always occuring. All events, all creatures, are messages.