The Bird with the Broken Wing: A Parable of Trust

Visitors to the Master in ‘Akká recorded a small parable that He would offer to those who came to Him in deep distress — those who had been ill for years, those who had lost a child, those who had run through every consolation the world could furnish without finding rest.

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A bird, the Master would say, had broken its wing. It tried at first to fly. The wing would not lift it. It tried to walk; the ground was crowded with cats and with the wheels of carts. It tried to hide in a thicket; a fox came near. It tried, then, to make a small shelter for itself in the corner of an old wall; the wall fell.

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At last, the parable says, the bird did what only the most desperate creatures think to do. It hopped, exhausted and bleeding, to the doorway of the One who had made it. It laid itself, with its broken wing trailing, in the open palm of that hand. It said nothing; it had no strength to say anything; it simply lay there.

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And in the hand, the parable says, the wing began to mend. The heat of the hand reached the wing; the bones knit; the feathers straightened. After many days the bird stood, opened the wing, and flew. But it never forgot the hand. It returned to it often.

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The Master would offer the parable to inquirers and to old believers in the same gentle voice. The work of religion, He would say, is not finally a work of flying. It is a work of laying oneself in the hand. The flying, when it returns, is given. The healing comes through the surrender. The bird that will not lay itself in the hand will not, in this world or the next, be made whole.

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The friends who heard the parable, several recorded, found themselves quietly weeping when He had finished. The image was small. It carried, however, the central counsel of His ministry: that the work of the soul is to lay itself in the hand of God, and to wait there until the hand has finished.

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*Paraphrased from Stories Told by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 2000); see original for full text.*

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