Murderous Birds

In the cycle of liturgical readings this last week, we were again served up the story of the murder of Stephen by an enraged mob.

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. 

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.

The Ape and the Machine

A while back, my phone stopped charging.  I was on a road trip with family, and though the phone was plugged into a 12V to USB connector, it just wasn't taking a charge.  I'd watch it struggle, the charging graphic flitting on and off as I navved our way home.  It didn't lose charge, but neither could it seem to bump up above 65%.

It's a cheap refurb Samsung, because that's how I roll.  Sure, it was a hundred and seventy five bucks, but it still chugs along nicely at a fraction of the price of new.  Refurbs do that, right up until they don't.

It was, rather obviously, something to do with the connection between the phone and the charger cable, which is the increasingly ubiquitous USB-C.  Either the phone was dying, or my cable had given out.  When I got home, I slotted a USB fast charger into the phone, and that worked like a charm.

So the issue was the cable, or rather, the pluggy bit.  Well, good, I thought.

Cables are cheap, and we dispose of them much as we dispose of things we perceive of has having little value.  This was the same one that had come with the phone when I bought it, so it wasn't exactly built to last.

I could just order another one.  It's what we do.  You don't bother fixing such things.  

Only, looking at it, I found myself wondering what a fix would entail.  Did I really need to add more waste to the world?  Here, an object so complex that for most of human history, creating it would be beyond the ken of even the most skilled artisans or scientists.  It is capable of transferring both power and gigabits of data, carrying as much information in a second as all human writing from our first scratches on cave walls through to the founding of the American republic.  Why dispose of it?  What was most likely wrong with it?  

For the twenty four pins on interior of the two-sided USB-C connector to work, they've got to come into contact with the pins on the receiver.  The connector, being made of inexpensive metal, is entirely capable of deforming over time, loosening to the point at which connections are inconsistent.  That diagnosis exactly matched the nature of the failure.  

So fixing it should be straightforward.  Just apply force.  But how to do so without breaking it?  I have no pliers that are adequately delicate, and the odds of just mashing it into uselessness seemed high.

Then I realized, well, no, I did have what I needed.

I picked up the cable, and delicately placed the connector in between the canines of the right side of my mouth.  I touched the tip with my tongue, feeling the coolness of the metal.  A tongue is a remarkably sensitive organic instrument, really rather excellent at perceiving small things and infinitesimal variations.  

Then I bit down, applying a tiny but slowly increasing amount of force to the center of the connector.  A moment passed, and another, and then my tongue felt the metal give, ever so slightly, the very smallest of movements. 

I held it up and peered at it through my reading glasses.  No visible change.  Good.

When I plugged it into my phone, it worked perfectly.

A win for the higher primate, I suppose.

Save the Whales

Every Sunday on my way to my bitty church, I pass my local up-and-coming independent mini-mega church. They've been running a sermon series for the last month or so on heaven, and the question posed on their signage today was a simple one: ANIMALS IN HEAVEN?

The purpose of such a question is rather simple...will there be a doggie door on our heavenly mansion for Mr. Barky? Anyone who has a pet to which they've had deep emotional ties really doesn't want there to be any question: Captain Fluffykins will be there forever and ever.

Of course, I tend to find that way of understanding heaven a bit simplistic, but when you get right down to it, I think...sure. Yes. Of course animals are there. If you're OCD about scriptural references, it straight up says so in Ecclesiastes. Not the cheeriest of prooftexts, but hey, it answers the question.

Animals, of course, tend to be simpler creatures, and one could argue that they're considerably less aware than we are of their surroundings. As beings that have less self-awareness, they aren't prone to the type of destructive self-seeking that defines human sin...and therefore they'd just automatically get in. That, I would think, would be the theological position that a thoughtful pastor consoling a churchgoer at the loss of a companion animal might provide if pressed.

There's a deeper fuddle to this, though. Not all animals lack self-awareness. Higher primates like chimps and orangutans and gorillas clearly demonstrate memory, awareness of themselves as selves, and are even capable of grasping and expressing certain forms of human language. They can show compassion towards one another, and are also capable of intense brutality. But can they sin? If they have self-awareness, the answer would seem to be yes. If so...then are they somehow inherently unsaved according to the evangelical rubric? Koko the Gorilla never signed that she had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, after all.

A solid counterargument would be that even the brightest of the "lesser creatures" are like children, and thus not fully culpable for their actions. But...what about creatures that aren't meaningfully "lesser" than many folks who've responded to an altar call. Elephants have fairly sophisticated infrasonic language, and have brains and vocabularies that meet or exceed those of most reality TV stars. Cetaceans are clearly our equals, although the forms and structures of their intellects are very different from ours. That doesn't matter, though.

If they have sentience, and they have will, and they are aware...then from the basic underlying assumptions of orthodox theology, they should be capable of sin. But they don't know nor can they know Jesus, as they're not able to read the tracts we earnestly press up against the glass wall at SeaWorld.

Does this mean they're inherently damned? Or just that the contemporary evangelical understanding of sin and Christ's purpose isn't quite adequate to the task of explaining it's way through this conundrum?