A Celebration of Life at Christmas!
Jacques Pierre was just an ordinary bird, a parakeet with green and yellow feathers. Handsome, but not exotic. And yet Jacques Pierre was very special indeed. He was unique and irreplaceable. Each morning as I passed his cage sleepily on my way to the kitchen and coffee, he would race to the side of the cage to squeeze his little beak through the slots, to chirp, perhaps to get a “kiss.” Jacques Pierre loved with all of his little bird being.
Early on he learned to talk. Words began to tumble out, like his name, “Jacques Pierre,” and “I love you.” After having her baby, when my daughter would visit he was perched near my granddaughter’s play pen at my home. As my daughter would pass by the baby she’d often look at her and say “sweetheart.” One evening at a dinner party at my house, a strange voice – not one seated at the table – shouted “Sweetheart!” There was a moment of startled silence where everyone wanted to make sure someone else had heard what they just heard. Then my daughter said meekly: “I think I said sweetheart a lot. Jacques Pierre must have learned it.”
Jacques Pierre would squawk at loud voices and rub against the cage with affection. He trusted my one cat and would run toward him. Fortunately, he did not trust the other cat. He had discernment.
Then one hot summer night I watched helplessly as Jacques Pierre died in his small cage. At first he recognized me one last time, and then he collapsed, struggled a little and then ceased to breathe. No matter what physical force could have made his heart beat again or his lungs fill up with air, Jacques Pierre was gone. All the uniqueness, everything that was Jacques Pierre, had slipped away, never to be replaced.
I remembered the words of our Lord: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” (Matthew 10:29)
We have become what George Will called us a while back on This Week, “a culture of death.” As I watched that little bird with a personality flop around his cage before the struggle ceased, I thought of all the efforts today toward producing the “good death:” assisted suicide, timed in man’s timing and anaesthesized with special aromatics, flowers, dying music and experts on the “good death” on hand to choreograph it all. Into the darkness I exclaimed, “Death is ugly. Ugly!”
Comments Charles H. Spurgeon: “We speak too flippantly of death, but dying is no child’s-play to any man...You may surround death if you please with luxury, you may place at the bedside all the dear assuagements of the tenderest love, you may alleviate pain by the art of the apothecary and the physician, and you may decorate the dying couch with the honour of a nation’s anxious care, but death, for all that, is in itself no slight thing...”
Yet, as I contemplated the process of dying that night, I was forced to remember, too, that God has said in His Word that blessed in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints. The death process is tainted by and is indeed a direct result of the fall of Man. Yet there is no ultimate victory in death or the grave. “The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor. 15:56-57)
For human beings who are created in the very image of God, even the dying process has meaning. That is why it is wrong to tamper with God’s timetable of our life. Spurgeon once preached that hopefully “...the last moments before our death will teach us something concerning obedience which is not to be learned in the rest of life. I know not, but it may be that those last hours before the spirit shall be severed from the body, will teach us, once for all, what is the casting of the soul on God in all its fulness, and the entering of the soul into communion with God in all its blessedness.”
I have lost most of my family through death: violent death, death from illness, sudden death, slow death. But in the simplicity of the death of a bird I could see the uniqueness of each living being so clearly, so much more objectively. I could see with clarity the sanctity of every life which God creates, especially human life. In Christ’s reference to the sparrow, the same inference is drawn; for He goes on to say: “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; ye are of more value than many sparrows.”
Sometimes we have to see something small, like the death of a bird, to see something profound like the sanctity of life. Says Spurgeon: “Blessed is that man who seeth God in trifles! It is there that it is the hardest to see him; but he who believes that God is there, may go from the little providence up to the God of providence....it is our firm belief that he who wings an angel guides a sparrow.” Human loss can be too overwhelming to completely absorb at the moment it is occurring. It is not a moment when one can objectively philosophize. But with the death of a bird, while there may be sorrow, there is still greater detachment.
In the middle of the festivities of the Christmas season there is no better time to contemplate the sanctity of human life. Christmas is a celebration of life. A helpless baby in a humble stable; God-Man sent to redeem humankind in a death on the cross. Miracles abound: a virgin birth; an escape from a king who would kill the King of Kings; a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah; a resurrection from a guarded grave; an ascension into Heaven with three hundred witnesses. Why all of this? Because your life and mine are sacred to God. Because each human being has God’s unique handprint on him or her. That is what Christmas is all about.
At the time of World War II, when the Nazis were attempting to kill God’s chosen people the Jews, a Dutch watchmaker’s family in Holland hid Jews and helped them escape out of the city into the country where they would be more safe. One evening as he held a small Jewish baby in his arms, father Ten Boom declared: “They have touched the apple of God’s eye.” That which has been created by God is sacred, especially that which has been made in His very image. To deface that image in anyone is to defy the God of the universe.
It is common for serial killers to have a childhood history of torturing and killing animals. Most people don’t go that far. But maybe if we don’t teach the sanctity of life early on to our children by showing them how to treat their pets and how to put other people first before themselves, we should not be surprised if later in life they do not respect the importance of each individual human life.
A sparrow, a Jacques Pierre, a child’s pet, an old man’s faithful dog: we see the preciousness of God’s creation when we take time to identify with the most humble of His creatures. As with Christ and the illustration of the sparrow, perhaps we learn from these more humble beings of God’s creation the true sanctity of all life, especially that of those made in His image.
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For more of Elizabeth Skoglund’s writing, please visit her Books page.