Pelicans

This photo from a kayak trip I took with my daughter on Oak Island last year captures a resting pelican in the boat in the background. Pelicans are fascinating birds and amazingly graceful in spite of their rather "ugly duckling" looks.

A curious image from early church art is that of a pelican with blood dripping from its breast on its chicks gathered around her. The art is based on a common myth, current in the early centuries A.D., that a mother pelican, when food could not be found, would pierce its own breast so that its blood would provide sustenance for its young. Turns out that pelicans don't actually do this. However, the belief that they did made selection of this image a fitting subject for Christian art - the sacrifice of the pelican as an analogy to Christ's sacrifice for humankind.

I had pelicans on my mind today after viewing the recent photos of pelicans flailing in oil sludge washing up on the Louisiana coast. Surely you have seen the pictures by now. They are enough to make one weep. I don't think this is what God had in mind when humankind was given dominion over creation. Matthew Scully, in his book Dominion, makes the case that at the very least, animals should be treated with mercy. His argument is a jab at the industrial food complex, but the basic theology certainly applies to the current ecological nightmare on the Gulf. There will unfortunately be no mercy for God's creatures, and we will all suffer for it.

Sacrifice - the word is used these days only to apply to those who join the military and fight our country's battles. In the everyday world of business as usual the word sacrifice rarely comes into play, unless it is a call for workers to make sacrifices for company profits. Aah, sorry, I just crossed the line and got on my soapbox didn't I? Still, we could use a little more sacrifice like that of the early church's pelican, like that of Jesus, the One we Christians supposedly follow, so that all God's creatures might flourish. If we could just learn to settle for enough, as the old saying goes, "enough is as good as a feast." I'm sure the pelicans would thank us if they could.