Kind Pelicans -- Midweek Message

Kind Pelicans

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

July 15, 2020

Elena and I are at the beach on a small vacation, masked and distanced at 6 feet from others.  Yesterday we saw a large group of pelicans fly in and land in the water in front of us, and then dive, hunt, and return to the surface to feast on fish for a half an hour.  Sitting amazed at the joyful, almost playful scene, my thoughts wandered: pelicans, despite all their smelly, noisy selves, have for almost 1500 years been symbols for Christians of our Lord.   I have a chasuble with a large embroidered emblem of a pelican feeding her young.

Like many birds, pelicans eat and partially digest their food and then regurgitate it, often red from the blood of the prey, to feed their hatchlings.  But pelicans are larger and people can see this messy behavior, though they cannot usually get close enough to see exactly what’s going on given the bird’s aggressive defense of its own space.     In the pre-Christian classical world, the behavior was mistaken for the mother pelican wounding her breast and feeding her chicks with her own blood.  So when Christians came on the scene, this image of a self-sacrificing, caring, loving parent was understood as a type or allegorical figure for Christ. 

The image even made it into one verse of St. Thomas Aquinas’ great Eucharistic hymn, Adoro te devote (Humbly I adore Thee, Verity Unseen): 

Pie Pelicane, Jesu Domine,

Me immundum munda tuo Sanguine:

Cujus una stilla salvum facere

Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.

         Gentle Pelican, Lord Jesu

         Wash me clean with your blood

         One drop of which makes safe

         The whole world, from every evil. 

 

Some find it strange to preserve and use a Christological image that is based on a biological misunderstanding:  pelicans do not wound themselves to feed their children.  But there is a deeper matter at issue:  God reveals Godself to us in our own language, in our own cultural tradition, and sometimes that means that God’s revelation is mixed up with strange and fanciful things later proven to be not so.  But that does not take away the truth of revelation, it merely places it in context.  Historically, it made such truth accessible.   

It is easy to blame the past, and think we are so much more clever and morally justified than those who went on before.  We can see it in some of the excesses of today’s “cancel culture” that, though rightly seeking to remove from our current common life images and symbols that endorse and support systemic oppression, occasionally wants to rid our collective life unreflectively of all images from the past that may not be up to snuff by today’s lights of justice and fairness.   But those who went before were, like us, imperfect and flawed.  And we, like them, will be found wanting by tomorrow’s standards in ways that we can barely predict today.  The issue is not whether a historical figure was perfect or completely “woke,” but rather 1) whether they worked to end the injustice they may have, as people of their age, benefited from, and 2) whether our use of them as heroes or heroines, saints or blessed ones, or monuments, actually gets us closer to fulfilling God’s intentions for us.  All that is demanded of us, says Micah, is to love compassion, do justice, and walk humbly before God.  

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+