Peter’s February 2026 Blog

Birdsong Beneath Broken Windows

A sparrow – I think it was a sparrow – perched on a flower arrangement a little way off, fixing me with a look that suggested he had seen hundreds of people like me before breakfast and wasn’t particularly impressed.

I, on the other hand, was utterly captivated.

He was not alone. Above me, birds of different kinds wheeled and darted through the air inside the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Yangon, Myanmar. The vaulted arches were alive with the sound of their chirruping. The great space turned into something like a woodland clearing.

This is not, in my experience, the usual state of affairs in cathedrals.

In the English cathedral where I once served, the arrival of a single sparrow was enough to provoke more flapping in the local press than the bird ever managed in the nave. A cathedral, in that world, was meant to be sealed, orderly, protected from such intrusions.

But Yangon’s cathedral is not sealed.

Built in the early 1900s, it was never intended to be open to the sky. Yet on my recent visit, the upper levels were without window glass. Not because of some romantic antiquity, but because of something far harsher: the grinding reality of Myanmar’s present.

Repairs are impossible when a country is enduring what is now bleakly termed a “polycrisis” – economic collapse, intensifying conflict, climate hazards, deepening poverty. A convergence of disasters that ravages communities like the horsemen of an old apocalypse.

And yet.

Even in that dark light, there was something unexpectedly beautiful about those birds. Their fragile bodies, their wild delight, did not distract from what else was happening in that cathedral. They added to it. They brought an irrepressible vibrancy, an affirmation that life insists on singing even when circumstances suggest it should fall silent.

That insistence is something you can feel in Myanmar if you are attentive – though so, too, is sorrow.

During my brief visit, I encountered a sadness that sat heavily on the streets. I saw things that moved me to tears – families with young children settling down to sleep beside cars on cracked, filthy pavements outside my hotel; lives lived on the edge, with no certainty of safety, shelter, or even the next meal.

And yet Myanmar remains, despite everything, a significant source of seafarers. Men and women who go out onto the world’s oceans, sustaining global trade while carrying the weight of hardship at home.

Among those working alongside them is a local branch of The Mission to Seafarers. We have served in Myanmar for many years. Political turmoil once led to the expulsion of voluntary agencies and the seizure of property, but, ten years ago, the Mission was relaunched in Yangon, and I was there to mark the tenth anniversary of that renewal. What struck me most was not ceremony, but people.

We can only afford to pay three staff. The rest are volunteers.

Volunteers.

In a country where so many do not know where their next meal will come from, the very word feels almost implausible. And yet they are there: one cleaning, another teaching English to seafarers, another offering computer skills. Others work with seafarers’ families, building confidence, teaching practical abilities that might help them earn an income. Beyond their specific roles, they are all simply present – ready to offer support with whatever need arrives at the door.

In the vast, echoing space created by Myanmar’s suffering, these volunteers reminded me of the birds in the cathedral. In some ways, neither should logically be where they are. And yet both fill the shadows with something stubbornly luminous: resilience, creativity, hope.

It might look more ordered if the birds were not flitting through the arches. It might seem tidier if every person working with the Mission could be funded, contracted, managed neatly on paper. It might even feel tempting, in a world increasingly shaped by efficiency and automation, to shrug off the demands that human lives at sea bring to maritime trade.

But something would be lost.

Because what I saw in Yangon – in birdsong beneath broken windows, and in volunteers giving what little they have – was a reminder that life is not only sustained by structures and systems. It is sustained by spirit. By love. By the extraordinary ways in which hope takes flight, even in the hardest of times.