For the Earth Day service, Rita thought she would make a raven. It emerged from nothing but the germ of an idea that settled on her shoulder during a meeting of the Christ Crafters. Quilts. Banners. Macrame. Ravens.

At YourPath Believers, they encouraged creative engagement with the spirit of deity. Rita believed she could create idolatry as worthy as anything foisted on the world two millennia ago. Jesus? Whatever.  

Rita cut up an old wool sweater and a tea cozy and a plastic soda bottle and some pipe cleaners and wads of cotton salvaged from prescription bottles and twist-ties from vegetable purchases and some dark-as-night latex paint and some plastic caps from ballpoint pens.

“You’ve turned a sheep into a crow,” Donna said, tucking stuffing into a lamb-like creation.

Rita nodded toward Donna’s beast. “Lamb of God?” 

Donna looked down at it. The thought had never crossed her mind. “More like mess of mine,” she said, and the two shared a giggle.

Rita took her raven to the pastor’s office in a cardboard box.

“Oh, a crow!” Rev. Sally exclaimed. “I love crows. They’re so playful. Always eating things … we never would. Thank you so much.”

She was genuinely excited and grateful at Rita’s ingenuity. 

Rita thought she was borderline imbecile. Crow? CROW? Ravens aren’t crows. Although, if the minister had challenged her on that point, she would have been hard pressed to distinguish between the two. Crow? Black. Raven? Black. But bigger. 

“I love the eyes,” Rev. Sally said.

“I thought, What would make good eyes?” Rita said. “That’s how I came up with using caps from ballpoint pens. I had to drive them into the head. For the eyes.”

With a prideful smile, she presented the bird to Rev. Sally. 

“It’s a statement.”

“It certainly is,” Rev. Sally said, wondering what it would say if it found itself in the dumpster out back. 

“It’s about the blob in the Pacific,” Rita said, “and recycling, and the lesson that the ravens bring from the dying ocean to the people who feed the garbage monster every Thursday.”

 “What do you think we should do with it?” Rev. Sally asked. She had a few ideas.

“I thought it could sit near the pulpit while you speak about God’s vision for eternal renewal and reinvention.”

Rev. Sally hadn’t planned to speak on that topic. 

“There’s a possibility,” she replied.

After Rita left, Rev. Sally went to the chancel and put the raven on a shelf beneath a stained glass window just back and to the right of the pulpit.

At service, Rita swiveled her head, looking for her raven. She couldn’t see it. After service, she walked up to the chancel and found it. It was hidden by the pulpit and microphone stand and some chairs.

In a few days, she called the newsletter editor, Osa, to ask if she had a photo of the raven. Osa said she hadn’t seen one. She asked who had the photo. Osa said she didn’t know, but that surely there must have been one taken. 

After hanging up, Rita called Rev. Sally, who apologized for not getting a photo. She said she would try to find time. She had Bess Garvin on life support to call, and Rudy Ether to discuss budget numbers, and she needed to meet the loan officer for the financing of the house she was buying after she and her husband had split up because she had reconnected with an old boyfriend and couldn’t keep her hands off him. 

“It’s a beautiful raven,” she told Rita. “I’m sure I can find time to get a photo.” 

She was a minister. She needed to lie to every parishioner, not just Rita. But Rita and her raven had flown into her view. She wasn’t much of a photographer. She tried. Pretty soon, Osa opened her e-mail and there was the photo from Rev. Sally.

“The raven,” Rev. Sally wrote in her mail. “Can you make it fly?”

Osa looked at it. It looked like an oil spill – a blob inside some goop against a backdrop of shadows and darker shadows. Black on black on black.

Osa couldn’t extract the image to use in her newsletter. Osa called Rev. Sally and asked her to re-send it, as an attachment. Rev. Sally wasn’t quite sure how to do that. So she called Fred Weston, who had built web pages and knew about these things. He offered to come by her office and show her how, because he had no idea what device she was using to talk with which device to send what sort of file to what sort of other device.

After she got the photo, Osa shared it with Rita, so Rita could send her a caption. Rita couldn’t tell that the photo was a photo of her raven.  

“It looks like a blob … eating a blob,” she said in a text to Osa about her concerns.

“Isn’t that what it’s trying to symbolize?” Osa wrote back.

“I know, right?” Rita said. “Call it the Archangel Blob.”

Osa was confused about what exactly Rita had in mind with the raven. Osa wrote back that the raven looked like it had been buried. 

“Maybe we need a committee to exhume it,” she suggested jokingly.

Rita ran with the idea. A committee? For my raven? What a great idea! 

Not two hours passed before Rev. Sally sent out an e-mail asking for volunteers to serve on the Archangel Raven Siting and Celebration Committee. She had asked Rita to chair it.

Rita had painted the raven from a can left over from a couple of years back when she and her on-the-spectrum husband had painted their house. The neighbors never said a word, but always commented beneath their breaths when walking past “the black house.” 

Before the committee could meet, Rita told Rev. Sally that it had agreed with her that the raven deserved a more prominent place. 

“Something that honored its leadership role in the natural world,” Rita explained. 

She said the committee had other ideas, but thought a plinth would elevate the raven to its proper stature.

Rev. Sally went to the chancel to visit the raven for inspiration. She was surprised to find it set prominently on the plinth, at the center of the chancel, beside the altar. Next to the nativity creche, with Donna’s Lamb of God among other statuary of mixed media. Rev. Sally pulled up a chair so she could dialogue with the raven.

Rita told Rev. Sally that the committee (it hadn’t met yet) had agreed that parishioners with whom they had not yet spoken were expecting a sermon linked to the raven. Rev. Sally often spoke of miracles chronicled in the Bible. How could this be, trying to extract a sermon from the motley materials of a recycled raven? She felt a migraine coming on.

“Rev. Sally?” the male voice called from the back of the sanctuary.

Rev. Sally turned toward the questioner. He was bearded, a little stout, carrying a large video camera on his shoulder. Another man walked next to him with a boom microphone. The first man said they had gotten a call from Rita. They were from KNOW-TV and there to do a spot on the “raven of redemption.”

Rev. Sally looked at the raven, as if it could explain what was going on. This bird, she thought, had taken on a life of its own. 

The raven was silent. It looked back at Rev. Sally, with its eyes made from the caps of ballpoint pens. Inscrutable.

Then it shook. It extended its wings from its knit-fabric body. It flapped them a couple of times. It rose and circled the sanctuary before settling on the cross-arm of the large wooden crucifix in an alcove behind the altar, Jesus bloody and lifeless and hanging there for sinners and saints.

Rev. Sally watched as the crucified likeness of Jesus lifted one of his arms from its bloody nail and reached toward the raven and shooed it into the air.  Like a fly that lands on your face.

The raven flapped its knitted and painted wings, circled the chancel, landed on the other side of the crucifix. 

Jesus turned his head to look at the bird. He smiled, to see the antics of his creation. He slipped his other arm off the nail, and swatted at the raven. Love it though he did, he didn’t want it pooping on the cross. 

Irritated, the raven rose and sped toward the back of the sanctuary, where it found a path to freedom through an open door.

Jesus shook his head slightly in amusement. Then he slipped his hand back over the nail. A little blood dribbled from the wound. He adjusted his weight, and slumped back into his eternal pose, forever dead until a touch of life might be in order, just to set things right.

The bearded guy with the camera approached her. “That was great!” he said. “We got some great footage. Can you have them … do it again?”

She smirked and tilted her head, as if to say, “You’re kidding, right? We just saw a fucking miracle, and you want me to do it again?”

When Rita arrived later to check on her raven, she felt her mood drop through the floor. The raven was gone. Someone has stolen my raven, she thought. Indignation – tempered with a small dose of pride – drove her to Rev. Sally’s office where she reported the theft. 

Rev. Sally was busy, preparing a sermon. She had seen the news that night. The phone had been ringing off the hook. A huge crowd was expected.

She expressed her sympathies  to Rita, wrapped in silent gratitude and relief. Gone is the eyesore, she thought. And soon, after this all calms down, we can get back to God as usual.

Rita, home a short time later and pondering her basket of maker stuff, smiled to consider her blessings. Now she could make another raven. There was no time to waste. 

It must be bigger, better, more impressive in God’s eyes. 

And so, she began to knit.