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| Image by Rob Zweers |
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Quails
A GREETING
Teach me to do your will, for you are my God.
Let your nurturing Spirit guide me
on a safe and level path.
(Psalm 143:10)
A READING
Now the Spirit went out from God and drove quail in from the west, and they alighted all over the camp as far as a day’s walk in any direction, in piles three feet thick. All that day and night and all the next day the people went out and gathered quail. No one gathered less than about sixty bushels.
(Numbers 11:31-32)
MUSIC
A MEDITATIVE VERSE
They demanded food, and God sent them quail
and satisfied them with the bread of heaven.
(Psalm 105:41)
A REFLECTION
In spite of all the talk about the law of tooth and fang and the struggle for survival, there is in the lives of the animals and birds a great peacefulness. It is not all fear and flight, pursuit and killing. That is part of it, certainly; and there is cold and hunger; there is the likelihood that death, when it comes, will be violent. But there is peace, too, and I think that the intervals of peace are frequent and prolonged. These are the times when the creature rests, communes with himself or with his kind, takes pleasure in being alive...I have seen the same peacefulness in a flock of wood ducks perched above the water in the branches of a fallen beech, preening and dozing in the sunlight of an autumn afternoon. Even while they dozed they had about them the exquisite alertness of wild things. If I had shown myself they would have been instantly in the air. But for the time there was no alarm among them, and no fear. The moment was whole in itself, satisfying to them and to me.
- from The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
VERSE OF THE DAY
We are free like a bird from the trap!
The snare has been broken and we are free!
(Psalm 124:7)
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Drawing of a corn crake, by Johann Friedrich Naumann (1899) |
The second half of these devotions will turn to birds who are not stigmatized by scripture but instead play a life-giving role in the biblical story or have become symbols of divine life. At the same time, we will see how much these same birds are vulnerable, threatened or nearing extinction in our own time. This week we will also feature the writing of Wendell Berry, the American poet farmer and environmental activist who died last week.
There is no specific mention of quails in the Levitical and Deuteronomic prescriptions about birds as either clean or unclean. God's provision of quails as food for those wandering in the wilderness is slightly different in the two accounts of the feeding: in Exodus the quails are linked with the appearance of manna and are a manifestation of God's abundance. In the Numbers account, they are summoned from the sea.
In our own time, quails migrate by the thousands from Europe to Africa where they are then trapped by hunters in huge nets spread along the edges of the Mediterranean as they arrive, exhausted. The nets used are fishing nets, erected along sand dunes. Fishing nets are a biblical symbol of plenty promised by Jesus. How does their use this way challenge our sense of abundant life?
Many of the world's species of quails are critically endangered, verging on extinction or actually extinct. Most famous among these is the Himalayan Quail, last seen in the western Himalayas in India almost 150 years ago. The Manipur Bush-Quail, another Indian species, dwells in the grasslands of the northeast and is rarely seen, as its habitat undergoes climate change-created drought. Scientists are trying to reintroduce the Masked Bobwhite Quail to Arizona after that species succumbed to drought in Mexico.
Our biblical stories are marked by ritual mistreatment of animals, including birds. But do our own contemporary stories have to be? In the spirit of today's music, how can we change the narrative of our time to become one in which we all thrive?
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Scripture passages are taken from The Inclusive Bible.
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LC† The Winged Word is a devotional series of Lutherans Connect, supported by the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and the Centre for Spirituality and Media at Martin Luther University College. To receive the devotions by email, write to lutheransconnect@gmail.com. The devotional pages are written and curated by Deacon Sherry Coman, with support and input from Pastor Steve Hoffard, Catherine Evenden and Henriette Thompson. Join us on Facebook. Lutherans Connect invites you to make a donation to the Ministry by going to this link on the website of the ELCIC Eastern Synod and selecting "Lutherans Connect Devotionals" under "Fund". Devotions are always freely offered, however your donations help support the ongoing work.
Thank you and peace be with you!
