Lord have mercy, is it a violent, unpleasant scripture. We’d rather not see it, rather not have to deal with a brutal death, not on a Sunday morning.
It’s one of those texts one struggles to find a framing for, not because it’s hard finding some contemporary analogue from our fevered newsfeeds, but because there are just too many. Perhaps a failed assassination attempt might best reflect the blight of violence this week, I thought, assuming we hadn't forgotten about that already.
I was fiddling about with several options, sitting at my kitchen table workspace working on the sermon, when a sound caught my attention.
It was a frantic chirruping, loud and relentless as an alarm, sounding from the bush just outside of my window. I glanced over, and I saw a big bull bluejay, six feet away from me, pecking intently at something on a branch. “What’s it eating,” I wondered, as the sounds of avian distress continued. It looked like a little strip of thin sliced chicken. Then I said, “Oh,” because attached to one end of the limp chickenslice, there was a single lifeless leg. And on the other end, a bald beaked big-eyed head. It was what was left of a chick.
It was a frantic chirruping, loud and relentless as an alarm, sounding from the bush just outside of my window. I glanced over, and I saw a big bull bluejay, six feet away from me, pecking intently at something on a branch. “What’s it eating,” I wondered, as the sounds of avian distress continued. It looked like a little strip of thin sliced chicken. Then I said, “Oh,” because attached to one end of the limp chickenslice, there was a single lifeless leg. And on the other end, a bald beaked big-eyed head. It was what was left of a chick.
I realized that this was likely one of the offspring of the shy Carolina wrens who flit about in the leafy underbrush beneath that bush, and I was right in the mess of watching one-a-them old school 1970s nature documentaries that used to traumatize me when I was eight.
Oh, my poor sensitive vegetarian eyes!
The jay took its time, gulping down the strip, and then the head, and then all of the leg but one tiny pinkish claw, which it left draped over the branch.
Then it turned, and winged deeper into the foliage. It returned to view with a frantically struggling baby wren in its beak, bludgeoned it to death, and then…the cries of distress that had caught my attention now silenced…proceeded to tear it to bits and devour it, right there in front of me.
Ah, I thought. The nature of violence.
Because for all of our romantic suburban haute bourgeois daydreams of how lovely it all is, nature is at the same time pretty danged harsh.
That jay does not care about the lives of those wrens. The wrens do not care about the caterpillars and spiders and beetles that they eat. The spider doesn’t care about the fly. None of them are aware of one another, or of the suffering that their predation inflicts. That violence is done without thought, without reflection, purely driven by the need to eat, the need for territory, the need to defend oneself. It’s unpleasant to watch, but it isn’t evil.
But we, we who are supposedly sentient beings? Why do we carry that with us? Why do we hold on to the inflicting of harm, we who are aware?
Stephen likely would have had something to say about that.
Then it turned, and winged deeper into the foliage. It returned to view with a frantically struggling baby wren in its beak, bludgeoned it to death, and then…the cries of distress that had caught my attention now silenced…proceeded to tear it to bits and devour it, right there in front of me.
Ah, I thought. The nature of violence.
Because for all of our romantic suburban haute bourgeois daydreams of how lovely it all is, nature is at the same time pretty danged harsh.
That jay does not care about the lives of those wrens. The wrens do not care about the caterpillars and spiders and beetles that they eat. The spider doesn’t care about the fly. None of them are aware of one another, or of the suffering that their predation inflicts. That violence is done without thought, without reflection, purely driven by the need to eat, the need for territory, the need to defend oneself. It’s unpleasant to watch, but it isn’t evil.
But we, we who are supposedly sentient beings? Why do we carry that with us? Why do we hold on to the inflicting of harm, we who are aware?
Stephen likely would have had something to say about that.
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