Would Christ have wept?
March 22nd 2009 20:48
The spectacled eider duck
Mary Colwell is a Catholic lay activist and environmentalist. About 15 years ago she went deep into the Arctic to film the spectacled eider duck, a rare species which lives all year round above the Arctic Circle. While other birds fly south for winter, it spends the dark months, as Colwell describes it, "sitting in the middle of the frozen Baring Sea".
It is an inspiring creature.
In filming the spectacled eider, Colwell stayed on a remote Arctic island favoured as a breeding ground. She captured images of a female brood with her clutch of eggs, and later filmed the ducklings waddling into the Arctic Ocean, the start of an isolated life free of some of the more disturbing influences of the planet, such as humans.
A few years later, Colwell telephoned the man who owned the island to ask how the ducks were doing, and was deeply shaken by his terrible response. During a check on the four females that regularly nest on his island, he had found all four had been shot sitting on the nest. The bodies had not been taken for food; neither had feathers or eggs been removed. The mothers, sitting on their eggs, had been shot for sport.
Colwell writes, "I put the phone down and wept, not just for the wickedness of the people who had carried out this callous act of violence but for the senseless loss of magnificent creatures."
Since then, Mary Colwell has been posing a question to everyone from lay Catholics to Church leaders. The question is this, "If Christ had been walking over that island and found those dead ducks, would he have wept? Not just for the people who had killed animals, but for the loss of the ducks themselves?"
Overwhelmingly, she says, the answer to that question from the lay community is “yes”, but the hierarchy is split, with many saying, “No, Christ wouldn’t weep over that which is not human.”
. o O o .
This story is a small part of an article about broader environmental issues generally and, particularly, the World Social Forum highlighting the Amazon’s diversity, held in Brazil on January 27 to February 1 this year. The full article can be read here.
Image: www.ducks.org and www.garykramer.net
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Comment by Lady Henrietta Muddling
Potter in a Harry
No. Why? It doesn't have an eternal soul. Hence why Christ wouldn't.
Christ could bring ducks back to life in an instant. But He didn't come on earth to save ducks. He came to save human souls.
St Francis of Paolo, the great wonderworker brought his pet fish back to life when the workmen cooked it for dinner.
St Anthony preached to the fishes.
Of course God loves all his creatures but there is nothing as precious as a human soul. And there isn't time to cry over a dead duck when humans are losing their souls.
It would be tantamount to crying over spilt milk.
Comment by Chris Champion
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It's an interesting take, but not a popular one it seems.
Comment by Lady Henrietta Muddling
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Popularity? Pfft. Have you ever considered how popular Christ was while he was on the cross dying? Only his mother and few of his loyal friends were there not abusing him. Even St Peter was in the distance because at the time he was a coward.
No-one truly understands what happened at Pentecost.
Comment by Damo
Environmentalist films rare ducks.
She grows attached to them.
Ducks get killed.
She Cries.
Then I scratch my head and wonder whether they the last of their kind or are their any more.
If the species is not extinct I am having trouble seeing why it is such a big issue. Ducks get served up for dinner every day and no one shed a tear.
The only difference in this case is that some jerk used them as target practice.
I do have a problem with this statement.
Comment by Chris Champion
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Comment by Lilla
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*with tongue in cheek* I think, men came here in spaceships from another part of the galaxy, they are unnatural in this place. Women of course were here already and are tied to the planet*s cycles and its pain as a place for all species to live out their development
/seriously/ Most humans understand the need of a symbiotic relationship in preserving that which preserves those encased souls of men and women, running around on it, the rest strikes me as propaganda to ensure the continuation of a race in harsh geographical and climatic circumstances. . . . and talking of which, the first commandment is *thou shalt not kill* now to the best of my knowledge it doesn*t say not kill this, but its okay to kill that. Assumption is not advised here. It simply says; thou shalt not kill. It can* t be good for the human soul to disobey the first tenant of its own ideology?
I find that I do not agree with the fundamentalist view here that animals have no immortal souls, either. They avoid pain, and seek affection and on some level they are sentient and not without a purpose. Some say they are representatives of other dimensions and galaxies. I think it arrogant to think otherwise. . that we were put in charge of them, was surely not to annihilate them?
I have no idea if Christ would have wept because I realised that to have peace, I had to stop trying to manage the universe . . but I know he did weep and for arguments sake, I will agree with Colwell.
Lilla . .
Comment by Chris Champion
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What a lovely comment.
It says much for the generosity of women that they didn't pack those men back into their spaceships, kick the doors shut and tell them to bugger off and not come back until they had grown up or become attuned to planetary cycles, whichever came first.
I don't know if Christ would have wept over those dead ducks either. But I have no doubt that Mother Nature did.
Comment by samaritan
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Secondly, through the whole of Genesis, when God is creating things, he says that he saw what he created and it was good. It doesn't say God saw what he created, but didn't really care about the plants or animals because they had no souls. It was all good. All of it. If it's good, then surely when those things are destroyed, it would upset him. Also, there seems to be a sense of God's delight in the things he is creating. If the creation of something can delight him, then the destruction of that something can make him get upset.
Samaritan
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Comment by stu-kicks
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Comment by Janet Collins
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He could no longer shoot deer for the fun of it.
Comment by Chris Champion
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Great point. I remember that film with fear. It's possibly the only film which has shocked me. I was in my early 20s, and what shocked me was the realisation for the first time of the inhumanity of war. Took me years to be able to watch war films.