Yesterday as I went out to tend to our chickens, I heard chirping near our wood pile, from a fledgling, I thought, fallen from a nest. But when I finally located the bird, it turned out to be a tiny day-or-two-old chick. More chirping led me to another. And then I found the mother hen, in a dark corner of an old dog coop, setting on a clutch of eggs. Later in the day, we found a third chick. So we rescued them and brought them all inside away from predators, and we now have three more chickens.Polish henThe mother hen is a white-crested black Poland chicken, which looks like this. According to this site, theyre not from Poland but from somewhere else in Europe and are a very old breed. She had disappeared for a couple of weeks, and we feared that she might have been killed. (The Phyllis Diller haircut restricts their eyesight.) But she had been setting the eggs all this while, and yesterday was the big day.Watching the hen and chicks, we get to see first-hand in what ways Augustine said that Christ was like a mother hen, as here. (For him, the egg was a symbol of hope.)

Let us place our egg beneath the wings of that hen in the Gospel who cries out: Jerusalem, Jerusalem, ... how many times I have wanted to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks, and you were unwilling (Mt 23:37). ... That hen is divine Wisdom which took flesh so that she could be like her chicks. Look at the hen with her bristling feathers, her drooping wings, with that cracked and clucking, weak and tired voice, and see how much she resembles her chicks. Let us place our egg, our hope, beneath the wings of that hen. (Augustine, Sermon 105, 11; PL 38, 623)

Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak, professor emeritus of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America, is a retired priest of the Archdiocese of New York.

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