When Hawks Descend: Finding Love's Secure Base Amid Life's Brutality
How attachment theory and Psalm 52 reveal the path from fear-based politics to secure love
On the choice between imperial predation and rooted love in a world where power descends without warning
In a world where power descends like predator birds upon the vulnerable, what does it mean to choose the way of the olive tree—rooted, patient, connected to underground networks of love that outlast surface devastation? This question confronted me yesterday morning as I witnessed both the brutal reality of natural predation and its troubling political parallels—revelations that arrived with the theological subtlety of a brick through a stained-glass window.
Outside our kitchen window, in the Rose of Sharon shrub that graces the view from our study, a house sparrow had been tenderly raising 2-3 babies. For days, I'd found joy watching her patient feeding, the gentle choreography of maternal care, the promise of new life unfolding in what felt like a sanctuary. I was entertaining the kind of comfortable theological optimism that makes creation appear benevolent and providence predictable—the sort of theological naivety that makes seminary professors wince and seasoned pastors chuckle knowingly.
I was in the study talking with Sajeena when it happened—a sudden descent that looked like a fighter jet dropping from the sky, or perhaps like prosperity gospel logic applied to actual economics. One of our three hawks that nest on Sanctuary Hill in our backyard had spotted the vulnerable nest. In seconds, it was over. The hawk strutted on the lawn like a predator finishing its prey, then departed as swiftly as it came—with all the moral complexity of a hedge fund manager explaining why massive layoffs actually serve the common good. The babies were gone.
The maternal bird's frantic searching afterward haunts me still. Her cries echoed what attachment researcher Sue Johnson would recognize as the deepest human terror: the severing of our most essential bonds, the shattering of our secure base. But they also echoed something more theologically troubling—the desperate searching of those whose theological world has just collapsed under the weight of what systematic theologians politely call "the problem of evil" and what the rest of us call "life."
The Attachment Wound That Echoes Through Creation
Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapy teaches us that we are, at our core, wired for connection—a truth that reflects something deeper than mere psychology, though apparently not deep enough to prevent us from creating political systems that systematically sever the very bonds we're created to maintain. We seek proximity to those we love, especially in times of both trouble and wonder, because we are created in the image of a God whose very nature is relational. The Trinity itself models perfect attachment: Perichoresis—the mutual indwelling of divine persons who find their identity not through independence but through self-giving love.
This is, of course, precisely the opposite of what we might call "American rugged individualism," which has managed to transform the image of God into something resembling a cosmic entrepreneur who pulls himself up by his own eternal bootstraps. The theological sophistication required to read the Trinity as divine endorsement for self-reliance is truly impressive—roughly equivalent to reading the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to successful hedge fund management.
We need our significant others to provide what Johnson calls a "safe haven"—a felt sense of security where we can exist without judgment or condemnation—and a "secure base" from which we can explore the world with confidence. These aren't merely therapeutic concepts; they're expressions of how the divine life itself operates. The Father's love for the Son, the Son's responsive love for the Father, the Spirit's connecting love that binds them together—this creates the ultimate secure base from which all creation springs.
Ironically, this stands in stark contrast to the theology of those who claim divine authorization for policies that systematically destroy the very secure bases that vulnerable families need to survive. It's rather like claiming biblical authority for eliminating food while invoking Jesus's teaching about bread—the kind of hermeneutical gymnastics that would make medieval scholastics dizzy with admiration.
When these bonds are threatened or severed, our entire nervous system responds with what Johnson describes as "primal panic." The maternal bird's desperate search wasn't just instinct—it was the biological imperative that governs all attachment relationships, reflecting the way all creation groans when love is torn apart (Romans 8:22). Any threat of separation induces fear and anxiety. Loss of those we love induces grief and sorrow that can feel overwhelming.
This is the human condition in its rawest form: we are vulnerable beings who need each other to survive and thrive, yet we live in a world where hawks descend without warning—and sometimes those hawks wear crosses around their necks and quote scripture to justify their predation.
The Imperial Logic of Predation
The hawk's swift violence reminded me of other predatory behaviors I've been witnessing—the way certain political movements swoop down on the most vulnerable among us with similar ruthlessness, though with considerably more theological creativity in their self-justification. The MAGA Christianist treatment of immigrants mirrors this same pattern: targeting those who are most defenseless, destroying the security of families seeking safety, creating terror in communities that should offer sanctuary.
What's particularly remarkable is the theological sophistication deployed to baptize this predation as Christian charity. Through a hermeneutical process that would make medieval alchemists weep with envy, family separation becomes "immigration enforcement," detention camps become "processing facilities," and systematic cruelty becomes "border security." The theological transformation is complete: what the Hebrew prophets called oppression of the stranger becomes, in MAGA Christianist rhetoric, faithful stewardship of national resources.
This represents what we might call imperial logic—the belief that survival requires domination, that security comes through the elimination of perceived threats. Just as the hawk saw only prey where I saw precious life, those who weaponize faith and patriotism often see only threats where the rest of us see human beings deserving of compassion. The babies torn from the nest become the children separated from parents at borders. The maternal bird's frantic searching becomes the desperate attempts of families to find loved ones lost in detention systems designed to inflict maximum psychological harm.
This isn't the Christianity revealed in Jesus Christ—the one that declares "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18), the one that commands us to welcome the stranger and protect the vulnerable (Hebrews 13:2, Matthew 25:35). What we witness instead is Practical Atheism—maintaining Christian language while systematically contradicting Christian substance through policies and practices that embody the very imperial logic Christ came to overthrow.
The tragic irony runs deeper: when people's own attachment systems are wounded, when they haven't experienced the secure love that casts out fear, they often become the very predators they once feared. This explains the psychological appeal of MAGA Christianism—it offers the illusion of security through the elimination of perceived threats, the promise of strength through the subjugation of others. It's attachment theory in reverse: instead of creating secure bases, it creates siege mentalities. Instead of fostering emotional regulation, it weaponizes emotional dysregulation for political ends.
Love as the Counter-Imperial Response
Yet even in the face of such brutality—natural and political—I find hope in what both Johnson's research and Christian theology reveal: secure love is possible, and it transforms everything it touches. This represents the Counter-Imperial alternative to the logic of predation—though one that requires considerably more courage than simply building walls and blaming foreigners for our insecurity.
When we experience what Johnson calls "secure attachment"—the felt sense that someone will be accessible, responsive, and emotionally attuned to us—something profound shifts in our nervous system. The chronic vigilance for threats diminishes. The desperate grasping for connection relaxes. We become capable of what she describes as "emotional regulation"—the ability to manage difficult feelings without being overwhelmed by them, or more importantly, without overwhelming others with our unprocessed fears.
These categories—accessibility, responsiveness, emotional engagement—are not merely therapeutic techniques but expressions of how God relates to creation. Paul's prayer captures this divine love's immeasurable scope: that we might "have the power to comprehend...what is the breadth and length and height and depth" of Christ's love that "surpasses knowledge" (Ephesians 3:17-19)—a love so vast it creates the ultimate secure base from which all creation springs. The Incarnation represents the ultimate accessibility: God choosing to become vulnerable rather than remaining safely transcendent, which stands in rather stark contrast to the theology of those who worship a God conveniently located in gated communities. Christ's responsiveness to human need—healing the sick, welcoming outcasts, confronting injustice—models the kind of attunement that creates security. The Spirit's ongoing presence provides the emotional engagement that sustains us through difficulty.
More remarkably, secure love creates what researchers call "Earned Security." Even those who experienced the equivalent of having their own nests raided in childhood can learn to give and receive the kind of love that heals. Through safe, responsive relationships, we can literally rewire our brains to expect goodness rather than threat, connection rather than abandonment—a neurological miracle that puts the prosperity gospel's promise of material blessing to shame through its sheer practical effectiveness.
This is love's most extraordinary gift: it doesn't just comfort us in the aftermath of trauma—it transforms our capacity to be present with life's brutality without becoming brutal ourselves. It offers the Palace-Manger Contrast—God's power manifested not through dominance but through vulnerable presence, which explains why prosperity theologians find the actual Christmas story so theologically inconvenient.
The Green Olive Tree and the Underground Networks of Grace
Yesterday, my pastor preached a prophetic sermon on Psalm 52 that spoke directly to this moment—with the kind of theological precision that would make those who mistake political talking points for divine revelation distinctly uncomfortable. She began with the psalmist's words against those enmeshed in idolatrous systems: "Why do you boast, O mighty one, of mischief done against the godly? All day long you are plotting destruction." The psalm speaks of those who "love evil more than good and lying more than speaking the truth," whose tongues are "like a sharp razor" and who "love all words that devour."
Without naming it explicitly—because pastoral wisdom sometimes requires the theological equivalent of speaking truth to power without getting fired—she connected this ancient critique to our current political moment. The ICE raids and deportations that tear families apart, the weaponization of faith for political power, the systematic demonization of the marginalized—these are the modern manifestations of what the poet calls refusing to "take refuge in God" but instead trusting "in abundant riches" and seeking "refuge in wealth."
But the heart of her sermon was the psalmist's response: "But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever" (Psalm 52:8).
She spoke of how olive trees are among the longest-living plants on earth, some over 2,000 years old—trees that stood when Jesus walked the earth, which gives them considerably more historical perspective than most contemporary political movements. Their extraordinary longevity comes not from their strength above ground, but from their remarkable root systems and mycorrhizal networks with fungi that connect them to vast underground webs of mutual support. These ancient trees have withstood countless storms, droughts, fires, infestations—flourishing precisely because they remained rooted, faithfully being olive trees rather than lashing out or engaging in brutality themselves.
This image transforms how we understand both Johnson's insights about secure love and the theological alternative to imperial predation. Her research reveals that we too survive and flourish through underground networks—the invisible bonds of accessibility, responsiveness, and emotional engagement that connect us to one another. These aren't just psychological concepts; they're expressions of what the poet calls "the steadfast love of God" made manifest through human connection, what we might call the Incarnational Presence of divine love in the midst of suffering.
It's a profoundly counter-imperial vision: while hawks compete for territory and prey, olive trees share resources through underground networks. While imperial logic demands zero-sum thinking, olive tree logic operates through abundance that multiplies when shared. The contrast could hardly be starker—or more relevant to our current moment.
The Daily Practice of Rooted Love
Johnson teaches that secure love isn't a feeling—it's a practice rooted in these deep networks of care, which makes it considerably more challenging than the emotional highs that often pass for spiritual experience in contemporary Christianity. It requires what she calls "accessibility" (being emotionally present even when it's inconvenient), "responsiveness" (actually caring about your partner's inner world), and "engagement" (staying emotionally connected even during conflict).
These practices demand something that imperial logic finds impossible to provide: the security that comes from knowing you don't have to eliminate threats to be safe, because you're connected to something larger and more enduring than your own defensive capabilities. It's the difference between the hawk, which must constantly hunt to survive, and the olive tree, which draws nourishment from networks that have sustained life for millennia.
In a world where hawks descend without warning, these practices become acts of resistance that mirror the olive tree's faithful endurance. Every time we choose curiosity over judgment, every time we offer comfort instead of criticism, every time we create safety rather than fear, we're drawing from and contributing to the mycorrhizal networks of love by which God sustains all life.
This is how love becomes transformative: not by eliminating brutality from the world—a task that exceeds even the most ambitious therapeutic interventions—but by remaining rooted in the underground systems that enable us to flourish despite surface devastation. Like the olive trees that can be severely pruned yet send up new green shoots that look like resurrected life, our secure bonds allow us to endure loss while continuing to create pockets of sanctuary where healing can occur.
This represents the essence of what we might call Cruciform Authority—power exercised through self-giving love rather than domination, authority that creates rather than destroys, strength that appears as vulnerability but proves more enduring than any imperial force. It's the kind of power that makes those invested in imperial logic deeply nervous, because it can't be controlled through the usual mechanisms of threat and reward.
Creating Sanctuary in a Predatory World
The Rose of Sharon will bloom again next spring, assuming our current ecological trajectory doesn't render such assumptions naively optimistic. The maternal bird, if she survives, may build another nest. And those of us who witness both the beauty and the brutality must decide what kind of presence we want to be in this complex world—a choice that seems to arrive with increasing urgency in our current political moment.
We can respond to threat with more threat, building walls and wielding weapons against imagined enemies—the way of the hawk, the logic of empire, the theological foundation of movements that confuse strength with cruelty and security with the elimination of vulnerability. Or we can do the harder, more courageous work of creating the kind of secure love that Johnson's research shows is humanity's greatest resource for healing and transformation.
The choice is theological as much as psychological: do we trust in the kind of security that comes from eliminating threats, or do we trust in the kind of security that comes from being rooted in networks of love that outlast any particular threat? The first approach requires constant vigilance and endless enemies. The second requires something that imperial logic finds impossible: faith in the goodness of existence itself.
In our marriages, our families, our communities, our politics—we can choose to be safe havens rather than hunting grounds, secure bases rather than sources of fear. We can learn to hold space for both sorrow and hope, both the reality of loss and the possibility of love. These aren't merely therapeutic goals; they're expressions of the gospel itself, the good news that love is stronger than death and that security comes not from our ability to control outcomes but from our participation in the networks of divine love that sustain all existence.
The psalmist understood this choice: trust in abundant riches and refuge in wealth (the way of imperial predation), or trust in the steadfast love of God that manifests through underground networks of mutual care (the way of the olive tree). One path leads to the endless anxiety of those who must constantly guard their accumulations. The other leads to the deep security of those rooted in love that cannot be taken away—a security so profound that it can endure even the descent of hawks.
The hawks will always be with us, along with those who mistake predation for strength and cruelty for security. But so will the possibility of sanctuary, the promise of connection, the transformative gift of love that enables us to flourish despite life's inherent brutality.
In the end, this may be our most essential choice: whether to add to the world's predation or to its sanctuary, whether to increase its fear or its love. Sue Johnson's life work reminds us that love isn't just a nice idea—it's a neurobiology, a practice, a proven pathway to healing that can transform even our most wounded places into sources of strength.
But more than that, it's an expression of the very nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ—accessible, responsive, emotionally engaged with our suffering, creating secure bases from which we can risk the vulnerability of love in a world where hawks descend without warning and sometimes wear crosses while they hunt.
The babies are gone, but love remains. And that, somehow, is enough to begin again—though beginning again will require the kind of courage that our therapeutic culture and our political culture both struggle to provide: the courage to remain vulnerable in a predatory world, to keep building nests knowing they might be destroyed, to choose the way of the olive tree in a world obsessed with the way of the hawk.
Perhaps that's the deepest irony of all: in a world that mistakes strength for hardness and security for invulnerability, the most radical act of resistance is to remain soft, to stay connected, to keep choosing love even when the hawks are circling. It's a choice that requires not just therapeutic insight but theological vision—the ability to see in our small acts of care the participation in networks of love that extend far beyond what any hawk can reach or destroy.
Essential Lexicon Terms Referenced
For deeper exploration of the theological concepts in this reflection, see my Political Theology Lexicon:
Theological Alternatives:
Counter-Imperial - rejecting empire logic in favor of cruciform faithfulness
Cruciform Authority - authority patterned after Christ's self-giving rather than domination
Palace-Manger Contrast - God's power manifested through vulnerability rather than force
Incarnational Presence - God's presence with us in suffering
Perichoresis - divine mutual indwelling as model for relationships
Earned Security - developing secure attachment through healing relationships despite early trauma
Theological Mutations:
Practical Atheism - maintaining Christian language while contradicting Christian substance
MAGA Christianism - fusing Christian identity with MAGA political ideology
Citations
Sue Johnson's foundational work on Emotionally Focused Therapy includes Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love and The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection. Her research demonstrates that adult romantic relationships function as attachment bonds and that secure love can be cultivated through therapeutic intervention.
John Zizioulas's Being as Communion provides theological grounding for understanding personhood as fundamentally relational, reflecting Trinitarian relationality. The concept of perichoresis—divine mutual indwelling—offers a theological framework for understanding secure attachment as reflecting the nature of God.
Research on neuroplasticity and attachment by scholars like Daniel Siegel demonstrates that secure relationships can literally rewire the brain, supporting the concept of "earned security" as both psychological reality and theological metaphor for transformation through grace.
Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life and Jeff Lowenfels's Teaming with Fungi provide scientific foundation for understanding mycorrhizal networks—the underground fungal connections that allow trees to share resources, communicate, and support each other across vast forest systems. These studies reveal how ancient trees, including olive trees, survive through underground mutual support systems, serving as a powerful metaphor for how human communities thrive through invisible bonds of care and connection.
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