As Robert Burns says in his Scots poem, 'To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church':
"O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!"
We can only speculate what sort of poem the louse would have written back to Burns. But my Grandpa Mullet often recited from memory those first two lines before he passed away several years ago - always in the context of someone having just said or done something that didn't land as it had obviously been intended to with others present, for whatever reason.
Speaking of animals, I came across reporting by John Rigolizzo from The Daily Wire yesterday that a male lion named "Josh" attacked and killed a long-time favorite lioness at the Birmingham Zoo within moments of being introduced to her on Monday. The lioness called "Akili" had been alone since 2021 when her mate "Kwanza" died. "Josh" was a transplant from the San Antonio Zoo and had been brought in to give Akili new companionship.
And can we call what the male lion did here immoral? Or what is the word to describe how we feel about such a story?
Along similar lines, this morning I woke up and was not quite ready to get out of bed at first, on account of knowing the coffee maker would not have run yet. So I was browsing The Daily Wire again, and another wildlife story caught my eye.
This one was reported by Tim Meads, and had to do with a 400-pound eagle ray who jumped into a family’s boat off the coast of Alabama last Friday. The ray was probably trying to escape from some predator, but got herself stuck on the boat, and subsequently gave birth to several babies on deck due to the stress of the incident. None of her offspring survived, but their bodies have since been donated to Dauphin Island Sea Lab for research purposes.
Can we call that business about the rays tragic? If not, what is the right word to describe how we feel when we hear a story like this?
In other news, I was reading ‘Retrieving Augustine’s Doctrine of Creation’ again yesterday. I’m three-quarters of the way through it now. But Ortlund just covered in Chapter 4 what Augustine had to say to the possibility that animal death was present in the world prior to the Fall.
That is, in part, Augustine warns against trusting self-referential assumptions. And Ortlund takes this to mean that we ought not to refer to ourselves so much, specifically how we feel about animals dying.
Animal death is good if God says it’s good. That's one argument someone could make. And while that’s true enough as far as it goes, it doesn’t establish the premise. It doesn't establish that God did in fact say that animal death was good in the beginning before the Fall. That remains to be seen, in my view.
But perhaps we do well to consider the Hebrew word 'nephesh' here and how it's used to describe animal life like birds, fish, whales, and beasts of the field, as well as mankind.
Thereafter, let's ask some worthwhile questions about the lion laying down with the lamb, a certain pagan king losing his mind and resembling a wild beast for a time, when precisely mankind was given the blessing of the Almighty to eat the animals, how all Creation groaneth being subjected unwillingly for a time to the effects of sin, and how the sacrificing of animals to make atonement under the Old Covenant relates.
What we may come to realize in the end is that many things must be true all at the same time, albeit in a way that humbles and even surprises us.
