Skip to main content

January 12: Cardinal Sins

I have two birdfeeders off my deck. Yesterday, we had a rare 4 inches of good, clean snow and the world now looks idyllic.

The male cardinals act like kings or Vikings or conquerors in my back yard. Four birds perch on the feeders, three cardinals. They deign to let a wren or chickadee land for a short while, but most of them are on the ground, eating the crumbs that either I dropped in the snow or the other birds were not able to keep in their mouths. Or perhaps they are feeding others? Can we know? That is probably our tendency, post-romanticism, of attributing humanity and even human kindness to animals.

“Cardinal sins” is a Roman Catholic term; Wikipedia says they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth (acedia). (Wikipedia calls them the “Seven Deadly Sins.” I know they don’t have anything to do with bright red birds, and animals don’t sin; they just are. Someone called the birds cardinals because of their resemblance to the red-robed leaders of the Roman church.

Yet I see ourselves in those cardinals. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Birdwatching

 Whose world is this, anyway? My husband came out to the deck where I was reading, thinking, and taking long pauses to listen to birds and watch them visit the feeders. Nala and Butter were keeping the the squirrels away. The cardinals, like kings, were making sure they were fed first but wrens, sparrows, finches, robins, swifts sat in the trees calling and cackling. My Cornell Labs app has identified 18 in 18 minutes, some new ones included. “How interesting that God made all the birds have distinctive calls,” I said. “But I guess they are calling to their own kind, their mate and children.” “Do you think they are talking to each other?” he said. “Not like we do, no communicating, but signaling.” “I thought they were singing for us.” We laughed about that; our human-centric, self-centered view of things takes over. “They sing and make noises when we are not here, so it’s not for us. If they are singing for anyone, it’s God.” I had read Samuel’s speech to the nation in I Samuel 12,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Keeping Up Appearances? David's Surprise Anointing to Be King

  Have you ever watched the show, Keeping Up Appearances? What it is. A comedy about a British woman who wants to be thought of as very high class even though her family is low class. Her name is Hyacinth Bucket but she pronounces it Bouquet. She wants everything perfect but her family works against her, and her neighbors run from her. We all know someone who wants to keep up appearances, and sometimes we do. In our everyday life, we depend on our eyes and we automatically trust them, at least at first, and we often don’t look closely or below the surface. Like puzzles. But we know that appearances can be deceiving, even though they catch us. So I wanted to show this video I saw recently because it’s disturbing but informative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FERa1AI2EK8 AI has gotten far better on making these deep fakes—videos that are not of anyone but totally generated by the software. Even though they look like someone, they are not. Of course, it is stealing fro...
Post a Comment
Read more