Songbirds Fly at Night
As image bearers, we were designed to behold wonderous things. Indeed, a continual perception of glory is necessary if we are to fulfill our role faithfully. To this end we must give our attention. According to this privilege, we must order our steps. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes. To be a vice-regent, we must ponder the songbird.
Ponder with me, the migratory behavior of birds—the beauty and wonder of avian flight patterns. Think, for example, about the bar-tailed godwit. Weighing just 10 ounces, it boasts the longest nonstop migration path of any bird. Every year, this stoic wader covers around seven thousand miles, flying from Alaska to New Zealand without pausing for food, water, or sleep. Ponder the ruby-throated hummingbird. In preparation for its biannual journey of two thousand miles, this colorful creature will feast for a week, doubling its bodyweight in fat. Then, flapping its wings approximately three thousand times per minute, it carefully manages the calories so as to arrive at the target destination without a hint of surplus podge. Muse upon the bar-headed goose. Though its migration path is relatively short, the journey from Mongolia to India involves a pass over the Himalayas. Thus, soaring to altitudes of 7,000 meters, this fearless member of the two-winged community must fly on only 10 percent of the oxygen available at sea-level.
These fun anecdotes (and many more) come to us courtesy of countless ornithologists who have worked tirelessly to understand their subject matter. The migratory behavior of birds is a fascinating field of study. At the same time, each discovery has been met with some fresh unknowns—questions about flight paths, the answers to which are hibernating in some far-away land. How do birds navigate across land and sea with such immense precision? Why do some birds fly clockwise, while others (from the same flock) counterclockwise? And why exactly do most songbirds migrate at night? Do they forgo the navigational advantages offered by light for a less turbulent atmosphere, cooler flying conditions, fewer predators, or all the above? As the collation of data persists, and new hypotheses abound, our curiosity only grows. The migratory behavior of birds is an awe-inspiring phenomenon to behold.
At this point, you may be double checking your URL. Like a sparrow confused, did you accidentally land on the wrong website? What relevance is bird migration to the pastor, seminary student, or average church member? Certainly, the annual routines of the great snipe do not impinge directly on your daily decisions. Whether a bird migrates to Africa or Australia does not change your choice of coffee in the morning. But such does not render the information irrelevant. The migratory behavior of birds is worthy of our contemplation. Why? Because it is an example of what might be termed serendipitous learning.
Pertaining to the incidental acquisition of knowledge, wisdom, or beauty, serendipitous learning is a unique kind of education. Rarely do we seek it (in any formal sense). And seldom do we anticipate its trajectory. We do not sign up for a class in serendipitous learning. Nor do we foresee its effect on our lives. Most often, this kind of instruction seeks us out. It overtakes and confronts us with the happy end of broadening our limited horizon and increasing our perception of the world. Two minutes ago, you were probably ignorant of the behavioral patterns of the godwit. Now you are not. You’re welcome.
Commenting on the value of serendipitous learning, Yuval Levin draws attention to its distinct form, and effect:
Among the most valuable benefits of living in society is the miracle of serendipitous learning: finding ourselves exposed to knowledge or opinion or wisdom or beauty that we did not seek out and would never have known to expect. This kind of experience is not only a way to broaden our horizons and learn about the ways and views of others, it is also an utterly essential component of what we might call socialization. Being constantly exposed to influences we did not choose is part of how we learn to live with others, to accept our differences while seeing crucial commonalities, to realize the world is not all about us, and at least abide with patience what we would rather avoid or escape.1
What is required for serendipitous learning? By virtue of its incidental nature, the question is difficult to answer. On the part of the student, we might simply say, an inquisitive mind. Indeed, a hunger for learning is perhaps the only prerequisite necessary to stand as the ready recipient of unsought out wisdom. (For this reason, it is often children who are the most frequent beneficiaries of serendipitous learning. Not yet saddled with responsibility, their minds prove fertile soil for beauty or the wisdom to seek a harvest.) But there is more. Beyond an inquisitive disposition on the part of the student, his environment must be rightly configured. Since the whole enterprise depends on a unique intersection of knowledge and the mind, society must play its part. There is an unstated yet necessary layout to the classroom of serendipitous education. And it is with respect to this detail that we begin to notice some problems.
Levin points to the deleterious effects of social media. Governed by algorithms that continually narrow our experience of the world, we are guaranteed to see only that which we already know and affirm. Levin writes:
Such algorithms are a particularly important source of this loss of serendipity online. They are designed to predict our preferences, and so to ensconce us in exposures and experiences we might have chosen, rather than ones we would never have known to want. They affirm us rather than shape us. Therefore, they are forms of expression more than means of formation. We might say that in moving large portions of our social lives from the streets of the city to the arena of social media, we move ourselves almost literally from a mold onto a platform.2
Our submission to these algorithms comes by way of the social media “feed”: a brilliantly constructed series that deceptively presents itself as a fully orbed picture of the world. And their effect on us can be seen by considering our response, the “post.” With the Alps, the pyramids, or Sistine Chapel as a backdrop, the twenty-something influencer submits the next selfie. Well-meaning, he intends to show something of his experiences. “Look at me!” “Better than a day in the office.” “#loveitaly.” In reality, he confirms that he is a product of his time. His perspective is narrow. And his interpretive grid meanders between self-affirmation and self-elevation. “The grandeur of the world is my backdrop. Unfathomable beauty is my stage. I stand at the center.”
Again, the blame for this ironic inversion cannot rest wholly with its proponent. Though not altogether naive, the egophile also is not as adamantly self-absorbed as we might suspect. Rather, he has been conditioned to think according to a particular logic. His virtual utopia continually upholds his convictions and shields him from all others. Thus, over time his perception of the world is one that only ever acquiesces to his thoughts. He is the focal point of all that goes on. When this is his reality, how else would he view the Great Wall except as a mere backdrop?
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Quieted by God’s Love
Written by Reuben M. Bredenhof |
Thursday, July 7, 2022He calls the church to keep alive the spark: “I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent, and do the things you did at first” (Rev 2:4-5). Be quiet enough that you can hear God’s loving words to you in his Word. Take time to admire God’s greatness and to glorify Christ as Saviour. Then He will surely quiet you, and you will enjoy his peace.
Have you ever needed to quiet someone? That’s not yelling at your kids to shut up for a while or telling someone to get over their problems already.
To quiet someone is to hear them out, then gently respond to their concerns. Picture a loving husband doing this for his wife. She’s bothered by something, worried and stressed, and she’s crying. So a husband will quiet her and speak to her in her trouble.
That’s a good image for the hope God gives to Judah in the time of Zephaniah. The people had suffered many deprivations and indignities from the nations. This was God’s just judgment on their sin, and more judgment was looming, even a lifetime in Babylonian exile.
But despite everything, the LORD embraces his people and declares his unfading affection. God says in 3:17,
He will quiet you with his love.
What a relief to hear these words of calm after all the noise of Zephaniah’s earlier chapters. Judah has been hearing the warning sirens of destruction, and her peace had been shattered by violence: “The noise on the day of the LORD is bitter; there the mighty men shall cry out” (Zeph 1:16). There was no peace.
This is always the nature of sin and its effects: it is a cacophony of alarm and restlessness. For instance, all around us and every day we hear the shouting of temptation: “Try this! You deserve it! Click here. Buy me. Drink to the fullest. Don’t hold back! Because I promise you’ll be happier.”
Or you hear your conscience yelling its shrill accusations: “You’re guilty. You’re worthless. You’re hopeless. Why would God even bother with you?”
Or voices of doubt ring in our heads, “Did God really say that He loved you? Did God really give his Word? Is it actually worth it to follow Christ?”
The godless world just adds to the uproar with its distractions and diversions. So much information, so many conflicting opinions, so much noise and commotion—we can get overwhelmed by everything that’s going on, all the time.
But if you’re listening, God quiets you with his love.
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When the Family Is Abolished, People Starve
The peasants “were swollen with starvation, while the cadres were swollen with overeating.” The destruction of the family in China didn’t mean “more care, more love.” Mao knew. Communist Party Vice-Chair, Liu Shaoqi told Mao, “History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!”
Sophie Lewis wants to Abolish the Family. In her sympathetic review of Lewis’s book, Erin Maglaque traces through the “utopian” views of the anti-family movement. She tells of the 19th Century Fournier communes that “freed” women of the “drudgery” of cooking for their families. Lewis wants to expand on the idea of kitchenless households to include collective childcare. Maglaque writes,
The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, privatises care. The legal and economic structure of the nuclear household warps love and intimacy into abuse, ownership, scarcity. Children are private property, legally owned and fully economically dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – looking after children, cooking and cleaning – is hidden away and devalued, performed for free by women or for scandalously low pay by domestic workers.
“If we abolish the family,” Magaque writes, “we abolish the most fundamental unit of privatization and scarcity in our society. More care, more love, for all.”
Family abolitionists see themselves as liberators, but their dreams are dystopian. Only through force can the family be abolished as a crucial foundation of society. There is no love in force; the utopian hope of “more love” really means more hate for all.
“More love for all” was not how it worked out when Mao sought to abolish the family during his Great Leap Forward. Like the Chinese communists, Lewis sees no need for every family to cook, wash clothes, and raise children. For the Chinese, instead of paradise, the outcome was the worst man-made famine in history.
In his meticulously researched book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng reports, in harrowing detail, the totalitarian-induced famine that killed 36 million Chinese. The toll of Mao’s famine exceeds, by many times, the toll of Stalin’s death by starvation of Ukrainians.
Mao and other Chinese communists, according to Jisheng, saw “the family as the social foundation of the private ownership system and a major impediment to communism.” In a 1958 speech Mao said: “In socialism, private property still exists, factions still exist, families still exist. Families are the product of the last stage of primitive communism, and every last trace of them will be eliminated in the future.” Mao continued, “in the future, the family will no longer be beneficial to the development of productivity … Many of our comrades don’t dare to consider problems of this nature because their thinking is too narrow.”
Jisheng took a deep dive into the Chinese Communist Party archives. Chinese premier Zhou Enlai believed “thorough liberation required liberating women from their household duties.” Enlai “promoted communal kitchens and communal nurseries as the sprouts of communism.” Vice-chair of the Communist Party Liu Shaoqi observed: that “by eliminating families it would be possible to eliminate private property.”
The intent was to make the Chinese population more controllable and China more productive. A 1959 party report laid out the results:
People eat together in the canteens and go out to work together … Before the canteens, commune members could only work for seven to eight hours a day; now they work an average of ten hours a day … At breakfast, as soon as the bowls are pushed away, the section heads lead people out to work … Before and after meals, commune members read newspapers and listen to radio broadcasts together, improving their education in communism.
Food is usually cooked by families because it is efficient that they do so. During the Great Leap Forward, communal kitchens were rapidly established, some feeding up to 800 people. Jisheng reports, “The communal kitchens were a major reason so many starved to death. Home stoves were dismantled, and cooking implements, tables and chairs, foodstuffs, and firewood were handed over to the communal kitchen, as were livestock, poultry, and any edible plants harvested by commune members. In some places, no chimneys were allowed to be lit outside the communal kitchen.” In short, households lost even the ability to boil water.
The consequences were catastrophic. Jisheng writes, “Eliminating the family as a basic living unit reduced its capacity to combat famine.”
Introducing communal kitchens meant people had to go to a kitchen to be fed. Jisheng observes, “In the mountain regions, people had to tramp over hill and dale for a bowl of gruel.” The details reflect the mad arrogance of the planners:
In the spring of 1960 the newly appointed first secretary of Yunnan Province went to the countryside for an inspection. In the hill country he saw an old woman, covered from head to toe in mud, lugging a basket up a slope during a rainstorm on her way to the kitchen. Some villagers told him that this elderly woman had to cover only two hills and seven-plus kilometers, which was not so bad; some had to travel fifteen kilometers on their donkeys to reach the communal kitchen, spending a good part of a day fetching two meals.
The abolition of the family meant families couldn’t divide labor as they cared for the young, elderly, and infirm. Individuals can see through the eyes of love, but all that mattered to the communists was productivity. A party official proclaimed: “Even the old and feeble cannot be allowed to eat for free, but must contribute their effort. If they can’t carry a double load, they can share a load with someone else, and if they can’t use their shoulders, they can use their hands; even crawling to the field with a bowl of dirt in one hand contributes more than lying in bed.”
The communists seized homes. Jisheng reports, “Kindergartens, nurseries, and facilities for the elderly were established with resources seized from families without compensation, and homes were vacated to house the facilities.”
Of course, none of this was voluntary. Jisheng explains that “Cadres and militia ransacked homes and sometimes beat and detained occupants. When villagers handed over their assets, it was in an atmosphere of extreme political pressure. The campaign against private property rendered many families destitute and homeless.”
Jisheng describes, how initially, with “free” food, commune members gorged themselves:
The communal kitchens were most damaging in their waste. During the first two or three months that the canteens operated in the autumn of 1958, members feasted. Believing that food supply problems had been completely resolved, Mao and other central leaders worried about “what to do with the extra food,” which in turn led villagers to believe that the state had access to vast stores of food to supplement local supplies when they ran out. The slogan was, “With meals supplied communally, there is never any fear of eating too much.”
Of course, as food ran out, not all were equal. Jisheng reports on how the cadres [officials charged with managing communist party affairs] “helped themselves to white rice, steamed rolls, stuffed buns, steamed buns, and meat and vegetable dishes, while ordinary commune members ate watery gruel.” The gruel “was often execrable. Boiling cauldrons of congee might contain rat droppings and sheep dung.”
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Nebuchadnezzar’s New Humility: Daniel 4:34–37
We are not so far removed from Nebuchadnezzar, and like him, we deserve to be humbled by God. In fact, we deserve far worse than the king received in this account. Although God set us above the animals as bearers of His own image, we desire to be gods instead. For such a transgression against God’s holiness, we ought to be brought far lower than even that of a beast, which is exactly what will happen to all who refuse to repent. Those who reject Christ will forever be cast “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). They will share the same eternal fate as the demons.
At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever,
for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation;all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth;and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”
At the same time my reason returned to me, and for the glory of my kingdom, my majesty and splendor returned to me. My counselors and my lords sought me, and I was established in my kingdom, and still more greatness was added to me. Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are right and his ways are just; and those who walk in pride he is able to humble.
Daniel 4:34-37 ESV
After the time of madness, Nebuchadnezzar lifted his eyes to heaven, which was an outward sign of his newly humbled frame of mind. Only then was his reason restored to him. Twice the king tells us of his restored mind, and twice he follows with praise to God. He remarks in verse 36 that still more greatness was added to me; however, this appears to be an almost incidental fact now that he knows something of the greatness of God. Three quick notes are worth pointing out. First, while Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image appeared to be his declaration of the never-ending glory of his kingdom, now the king ascribed to God an everlasting dominion and his kingdom endures from generation to generation (v. 34). Second, he now calls God the King of heaven (v. 37), acknowledging God as a greater king than himself. Third, he understands that God targeted his pride, saying, those who walk in pride he is able to humble (v. 37).
Nebuchadnezzar’s great sin was pride, but the rest of humanity holds no bragging rights over him.
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