Deuteronomy 32:11, 12
11 As an eagle stirs up its nest,
Hovers over its young,
Spreading out its wings, taking them up,
Carrying them on its wings,
12 So the LORD alone led him,
And there was no foreign god with him.
The "him" is Jacob. I can't give you a pronoun without an antecedent--sorry.
This verse is part of what was shared Sunday at church. The imagery that was put with it intrigued me, so I wanted to check to see what eagles really do when they stir up a nest and get their young going.
What else? I Googled.
Christian sites that talk about eagles tell stories about how the parent eagles start pulling all the soft stuff (rabbit fur, down, ect.) from the nest when they "stir" it, making it uncomfortable for the eaglets to stay put, so they have to get out of there and start trying to fly. The good news is, Mama and Daddy are there to help and to catch them on their wings, or pinions, which are not like the feathers of most birds, spaced further apart and softer, which a baby bird might fall through. No, eagle feathers are sturdy and so close together that a baby eagle can even use its little claws to dig in and hang on to the flying parent who protects them and causes them to soar.
Doesn't that sound nice? You can imagine all the places I wanted to go with that metaphor, about me and God, and you and God, and there's nothing to worry about as I get urged from the nest of the San Bernardino Mountains into the skies of Idaho, soraing with my Heavenly Father.
Then I checked the animal behavior sites. Hmmmm.
Mostly I found stuff about the young "moving out" regarding bald eagles; I found lots of other info on different types of eagles, just not so much on their process for getting the kiddos flying. Seems like most eagles coax their young out of the nest with food and there's some flapping and fluttering and exercising going on in the nest prior to that.
Bald eagles, some say, will keep flying back and forth with food just out of the reach of the young eaglets so that they start leaning out to get it. And it might take a LONG time for them to finally lean far enough over the edge to get somewhere. In the meantime, since the parents aren't providing any food, the eaglets are losing their baby fat and getting leaner and meaner (literally meaner and more agitated, making sour-attitude little eagles, according to some sources). Finally, out of sheer starvation, practically, the eaglet jumps out as the parent flys by with a marmoset or something plump and tasty, and gives his wings all the flap-flaps he has in them. Apparently, if the little lubbers live to screech after their crash-landing, the parents start helping to feed them again as they learn to hunt for themselves over the next 8-9 weeks.
Important data noted by Kathie on more than one site: Approximately 40% of young eagles do not survive their first flight.
What kind of metaphor is that???
Sure, in this scenario, so the animal experts say, the eaglets only learn to hunt and be all "eagley" by watching their parents patterns and practicing what they do. I can dig taking that part of the metaphor into my emulating the Lord, watching Him and practicing more Christ-likeness.
But a 40% death rate? Ouch.
I just had a conversation tonight with Liann about the fact that I am hyper-context-sensitive. This applies to Bible verses and deciding who and what they apply to, and what can be "claimed" for yourself, as people like to say, and apparently also to imagery and metaphors and what I am willing to buy into.
I think I need to chill about this and start maybe just taking the good from stuff and just enjoying or appreciating something for what it's worth.
Good topic for the counselor this week, eh?
Flap-flap.
1 comment:
Could it be that you're taking a metaphor too literally?
Nah. Not you.
Do you think that the ancient Israelites were keeping tabs on the rate of survival of eagle chicks? Do you think the author was saying, "Well, what I want people to get is that 40% of the chicks bite it, but that more than half succeed, so that's pretty good odds"?
I'd guess the author was looking at what he had seen of their behavior and finding those points of intersection that were the most interesting. Like all metaphors, they break down if taken too far. I'm always a fan of digging as deep as we can to see just how many interesting facets of an analogy we can find, but since similes, by definition, compare unlike things, they can't match perfectly. Like most poetic devices, they're meant to give you an image, a snapshot that makes you think differently.
When you began to detail the information you found on the animal behavior sites, I actually expected you to discuss how much more apt the real information was, with God not only modeling behavior but holding out to us the vision of the good that is promised us, but we, all afraid of stepping out in faith to follow Him, resist for a long time until finally necessity forces us out into the air. That spoke right at me, and the beauty of imagery and metaphor is that it reaches us where we live, so that the same image can touch us differently at many different points in our lives.
When Isaiah says, "They shall soar on wings like eagles," do you pull out your biology text, do the weight-to-surface-area-ratio calculations, and say, "Well, they can't be just like eagle's wings, because they'd never be large enough to support our weight or have the available mass of muscle to power them"?
You goof.
ps--You know I only tease because I love...
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