Reflections on the Highway - Spring 2025

Over the past decade or so, I have become fascinated with the Pelican. For years, I have observed from the ocean front deck of the beach house. A flock of pelicans will do a morning fly over, cruising across the corner of the house. In late afternoon, they will fly back. Recently, I counted 21 birds in the largest group I have seen. They will also be seen soaring over the ocean, then cruising above the surface and finally, projectile like, crash into the sea and scoop a batch of fish into their pouch. It is quite a show.

Over on the sound side, we watch from the dock, a calmer setting. As Laurie and I were sitting there, we witnessed a most odd and delightful pelican encounter. One pelican came cruising above the sound waters and alighted. In an about face, it flipped around and began floating backwards carried by the current. Almost immediately, another pelican came cruising in, duplicated the maneuver and the pair floated together, backwards, as if on a stroll.

I began asking myself: "Why are you so fascinated by these birds of ancient demeanor?" Pretty ugly up against the egrets, herons and seagulls. Other than the polemic, "Pelican and Pelicant", I had not explored sources for the pelican. I first checked into biblical references which turned out to be, in Old Testament terms, uniformly unfriendly to the pelican, to the point of disgust.

One commentary described the pelican as a "voracious waterbird found most abundantly in tropical regions." They are labeled voracious "because of the number of fish taken into the pouch and then engorged to its young by pressing the pouch into its chest and dumping the load." With it's red tipped bill resting on its chest there developed a view that the pelican was pinching it's breast to feed it's blood to its offspring.

In Palestine, both the white and the brown pelicans live near the Dead Sea. They fish near the Jordan in the Mediterranean Sea. In the feeding, many fish dropped to the ground "creating a stench under the tropical sun unbearable to mortals." The unpleasant biblical references emerge. The flesh of the pelican, among other enumerated fowl, were forbidden to the Jews in Leviticus 11:18 and Deuteronomy 14-17. David's lament in the middle of afflictions: "I am like the pelican of the wilderness; I am become as an owl of the waste places." (Psalm 102:6). The image of the desolation of Edom is referenced to the pelican in Isaiah 34:11:

But the pelican and the porcupine will possess it and the

owl and the raven will dwell therein. God will stretch out

over Edom the measuring line of chaos and the plumbline

of desolation.

But then, in early Christian symbolism, the pelican's pinching of the breast, seen with the raising of its wings and a flow of blood became a symbol of Christ and his charity. Disparaged so before, the pelican is redeemed by the blood.

During this exploration, I recalled Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Welsh Jesuit priest and a poet. I have loved Hopkins’ poetry over years now and the soaring grasp of his true imagination, which included the description of the "inscape" of creatures. George Maloney, SJ, quotes Hopkins on the meaning of that term "as the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing." INSCAPE, GOD AT THE HEART OF THE MATTER, Maloney, Dimension Books(1978),intro,p.vii.

Hopkins' poem, WINDOVER, so beautifully and illustratively captures the inscape of a falcon:

WINDOVER

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

"I caught this morning, morning's minion, kingdom of daylights dauphin,

dappled-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding of the rolling level underneath

him, steady air and striding.

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing,

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend, the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valor and act, oh air, pride, plume here

Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod make plow down sillion

Shine, and blue- bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion."

So, I, transfixed and delighted by the pelican. Its nature revealed in its soaring, its visage, it’s crashing, it’s feeding, and it’s play floating backwards in a pair inviting Laurie and I to join in. Our “hearts” in hiding stirred for a bird, the achieve of the mastery of a “thing.”

Twenty-eight years ago, the Lord impressed upon me his way to see the inscape of a person, one person at a time, the inscape being the inner reality created in the image of God, though in the first encounter covered over and sunk into the depth of woundedness, despair and blindness to beauty, particularly the awful beauty of the Cross. Jesus saw the inscape of the woman at the well, of the woman caught in adultery, of Simon who becomes Peter, of Saul who becomes Paul. Jesus knows who he made and only he can call that image, that true identity, out. When we see the inscape of a thing, we see its beauty. This takes a beholder as Hopkins says: “These things, these things were here and but the beholder wanting.”

In seeing a creature this way, something spiritual, intimate and participatory is going on. It is Moses, stopping and turning aside to the burning bush. There is something holy in it that interrupts, preaching of deeper things, mysteries in transformation, if we turn aside to gaze and to listen. We have the opportunity to gaze on the inner fire of a thing, Christ, and listen in the encounter, as Moses did, to the voice God.

And then there is this:

"What a wonderful bird is the Pelican. His beak can hold more than his belly can. And I don't know how the hell he can."

Blessings,
Trip and Laurie