The falcon’s call

Awed by an encounter with a bird of prey high above a Texas river, Anthony Baker ponders both the place and his place.

Anthony Baker

Anthony is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

A view of a lightly misted valley to mountains in a desert area.

The view from the South Rim of the Big Bend National Park.

National Park Service Digital Image Archives, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Seeing God in Big Bend

The scream from the sky shattered the quiet calm of my cliffside campsite. I'd never heard such a sound—it was like a large crow had decided to try and quack. I rushed out of my tent, where I'd collapsed after making the seven mile trek up the mountain, to find the source of this alarming noise.

I was up on the rim of Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, where I'd come on a solitary backpacking retreat. The "big bend" is the abrupt L-turn of the Rio Grande river, as it changes course from southeast to northeast. At the heart of the park rise the stark and severe Chisos Mountains, and the crown jewel of the Chisos is surely the South Rim. A thousand feet beneath me, a sheer drop from where I've staked my tent, there is a whole other mountain range. And ten miles away to the southeast I could see gorgeously striped limestone ridges across the river in northern Mexico.

It's a place that puts you in the presence of the sublime. Everett Townsend, the pathfinder responsible for bringing the region under the protection of Franklin Roosevelt's government, was particularly awed by this view. As a biographer put it, the view from the South Rim allowed him to

"see God as he had never seen Him before and so overpoweringly impressed him that he made note of its awesomeness…"

What does it mean, though, to see God in a place? Do I need to be up high and far away, staring into sublime depths? The South Rim gives me the impression that I'm hovering like an eagle over the earth, not standing on it like a human. Why are these the places that we think we sense the divine?

I'd like to think that seeing God in a place can be just as much about close and near attention as it is about sublime distances. What does God look and sound like here, if I stand on the ground and pay as much attention as I can to what I see and hear around me?

The Falcon's cry

I had no Internet connection on the Rim, so when I heard that bird cry out over my head I tried to burn the sound into a mental audio file. Jumping from my tent, I saw a large predator bird shooting directly above me and out over the cliff's edge. The size and shape—a large flying crossbow—told me that I'd been hailed by a peregrine falcon. A sign near my site told me that the section of the ledge where I was camping—where the South and East Rims meet—is in fact a protected nesting ground for the birds, closing to human trekkers each spring.

The peregrine is the world's fastest animal of any kind. They can dive at 200 miles per hour. That means they can only hunt birds in flight, since if they attacked anything on the ground at that speed they would both wind up, as my Granny would put it, "nothing but a greasy spot on the pavement."

A display down at the park's visitors' center had already filled me in on the near demise of the remarkable bird. DDT, a killing-machine of a pesticide that Rachel Carson called out in her book The Silent Spring in the 60s, triggers an immuno-response in female birds who have ingested it into their bodies. This response limits the calcium they can supply to their eggshells. As a result, the eggs were too vulnerable to predators or simply weather, and the embryos were not surviving.

We gave the Nobel Prize to the scientist who discovered how to use DDT to kill insects. It made so much sense, after World War II, to find ways to kill the pests who were spreading disease among the wounded soldiers and other victims of the war. But we were not yet thinking, in those days, about what else we might be killing. Now we're at least thinking, even while we're still killing.

Sin and redemption on the mountain

What does the falcon, soaring off the Rim, reveal to me about God? Consider, for instance, the doctrine of sin. Taken as an abstraction, sin is what theologians call the manifold ways that humans can turn from their holy God. But what if we fill that doctrine in with attentiveness to the story the falcon tells us? Here on the Rim, sin looks like failing to be awed enough by this remarkable life form to notice, until almost too late, that we are killing it.

Similarly, redemption, in the Christian telling of things, refers to the way that God overcomes sin and restores holy relationship. Here on the rim, redemption looks like a shared grief over the damage we've done. It looks also like the effort to protect this space as a bird sanctuary—literally a "holy place." It looks like a hope that falcon and human, like the bird and its own prey, can find a balance of mutual respect and coexistence.

The warning call of God

When I came down the mountain, I got on the Wi-Fi at the lodge outside the park and went searching for bird calls. I found a match for the sound that I'd heard - that caw-quack of a scream. It was the warning call of a peregrine falcon who has found predators in its nesting grounds. The bird was talking about me! Maybe somewhere in her DNA she recognized me as one of the DDT users that ruined her ancestors' eggshells. Hearing that call, as the bird flew off into sublime depths and distances, I suspect I was hearing about the mystery of life, the damage of sin, and the beauty of redemption. In other words, I was hearing the voice of God.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Race

28 April 2025

4 min read

Sinners is standout thanks to Ryan Coogler and his ‘no stupid people’ rule

A cleverly choreographed culture clash between the living and the un-dead.

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who host's the 'God in Film’ podcast.

Two actors in 1930s clothes sit in an open car while the film director gestures towards them.

Delroy Lindo, Michael B. Jordan, and Ryan Coogler.

Warner Bros.

Coming off the back of Black Panther and Creed, Ryan Coogler fights off franchise fatigue with Sinners, a historical crime drama turned horror film that might be his most personal film yet. Set in 1932, Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers returning to their hometown in rural Mississippi to open a juke joint. But a trio of guests, both unwelcome and undead, crash their opening night.

Any film set in the Jim Crow era South following a Black protagonist can set off warning bells for savvy audiences. The blatant racial oppression can often bring with it a fair share of trauma porn. But that’s not what Sinners is about. For a significant chunk of the run-time, the film is downright hopeful. Jordan’s dual role as the brothers Smoke and Stack presents them as dangerous and driven, but also compassionate, responsible and endlessly charismatic – the type of figures who could easily become folk heroes. There’s a scene where Jordan’s Smoke not only employs a young girl to watch his truck, but also teaches her how to negotiate, doing himself a worse deal in the process. Watching them recruit musicians, cooks and sign-painters for their juke joint from the under-appreciated and under-paid is a compelling exploration of Black enterprise.

As night descends, and the juke joint opens for business, this peek into Black enterprise turns into a delightful celebration of Black joy. Chris Hewitt of Empire magazine referred to this film as a ‘stealth musical’ and it’s not hard to see why. Almost every main character gets a musical interlude of some sort. The standout by some distance is newcomer Miles Caton, who plays Sammie, the guitar-playing cousin of Smoke and Stack, who they recruit as the centrepiece of their entertainment for the night. Sammie is at the centre of a musical sequence that will have you leaning forward in your seat in amazement at what cinema is capable of. This film brings with it its own mythology, telling us that there are people whose music is so transcendent, they are capable of piercing the veil between the past, present and future. Sammie is one such person, and his talent attracts everyone for miles around, including ancient Irish vampire, Remmick, played by British star, Jack O’Connell.

Perhaps what’s unusual for a vampire film is that, as an audience, we’re having such a good time at the juke joint, we can almost resent the imposition of the vampires forcing themselves into the narrative. The racial parallels of these monsters might not be as obvious as the ones you find in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but they are still there. Remmick, as the head vampire, gains the memories of each of his victims, and he wants Sammie’s abilities as a means to communicate through time with those he’s lost. (Yet another example of Ryan Coogler’s ‘no stupid people’ rule. Every character has a convincing reason for doing what they do, even the blood suckers.) The vampires here are drawn in by the music and can represent a white ruling class that wants to exploit Black music for its own purposes, in much the same way that culture vultures took music of black origin like the blues and rock, and popularised it with more palatable white artists like Elvis Presley.

The sequence where the vampires themselves have a riotous, yet melodic dance in the dark, reminiscent of a rowdy worship session.

Perhaps another reason why vampires are such a popular monster to revisit in western culture is how they are a literalised inversion of Christianity. In the same way that Christians are promised an eternal life through the blood of Jesus Christ, vampires get immortality through drinking the blood of their victims. Even the rule where vampires can’t enter a private building without permission could be seen as warped version of the image of Jesus standing at the door of our hearts and knocking as shown in Revelation, the last book in the Bible. Vampires are a perverted vulgarisation of what it means to be a follower of Jesus and this, on an unconscious level as a society, might be why we find them so fascinating. The way the vampires use words like ‘fellowship’ to make their dark gift sound more appealing to those still inside the building suggests Coogler is conscious of this parallel. The sequence where the vampires themselves have a riotous, yet melodic dance in the dark, reminiscent of a rowdy worship session, further emphasises how music can bring people together.

There are so many fascinating aspects to the film it’s impossible to mention them all, which might be deliberate on Coogler’s part, as he tells EBONY:

“I wanted the movie to feel like a full meal, your appetizers, starters, entrees and desserts, I wanted all of it there.”

While this does mean a sequel is unlikely, and some critics have complained of it being over-stuffed, it does mean that the film will richly reward repeat viewing.

By now, Sinners will have no doubt secured its spot in many critics’ top films of the year. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners could so easily fall apart in the hands of a less skilled storyteller, but in the hands of one of the best directors of his generation, it absolutely sings.

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