Blackbirds: A Metaphor about God and Truth

"Now we see through a glass, darkly..."

~ 1 Corinthians 13:12a

Painting by the author, 24"x 24"

Imagine a flock of blackbirds suddenly rising into flight. A group of friends, catching a brief glimpse, tries to estimate how many there were. One says about twenty-five. Another guesses twenty. A third is sure there were at least thirty. None of them can state the exact number with certainty.

After discussing it for a while, one friend says, “Since we can’t agree on the number, how do we even know there were any blackbirds at all? Maybe it was just our imaginations.”

The others immediately recognize this as absurd. Disagreement about the precise count does not mean there were no birds—or that the number was whatever anyone wants it to be.

Yet this very logic is often used against Christianity today. People point to disagreements among theologians and denominations—differing views on communion, baptism, or the relative importance of certain doctrines—and conclude that Christian truth is entirely subjective. They claim there is no objective truth about God, that religion is just personal preference, and that we can never really know anything for certain.

That conclusion is as mistaken as denying the blackbirds existed.

There was a definite, specific number of blackbirds, even if the observers could not verify it or agree on it. No reasonable person would say the flock’s size was arbitrary or unknowable in principle.

The same is true of God and moral truth. God has a definite nature and specific attributes, whether or not human beings fully agree on what they are. Truth is not whatever we want it to be.

Agnostics often say, “We can’t know whether God exists or what He is like.” Others insist God is simply whatever each person imagines Him to be. But that is no different from claiming the flock contained whatever number of birds each observer preferred, rather than acknowledging there was one actual number.

The Bible promises the opposite: if we sincerely seek God, we will find Him. We can come to know more and more of His true character. In this life we see only dimly, “through a glass darkly,” yet many of us have glimpsed enough—heard His voice, seen His hand at work—to be certain He is there. And we trust that one day we shall know Him fully, just as clearly as we could have known the exact number of blackbirds if we had been given the chance to count them.

Revised from journal note of July 11, 2002 

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Local Art Seen -- Christie Carter Eliason @ The Red Mug

"Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly."

--Lennon/McCartney

Inside A Raven Conspiracy

Blackbirds and ravens are nothing new for Northland painters. In 2015 Ann Klefstad and Bridget Riversmith shared a batch of them last year at the Zeitgeist,  and a few more of Ann's appeared in the Corridor Gallery of the DAI this past fall. Birds are fascinating. DaVinci was captivated by them and I've painted a few blackbirds myself. This month through the end of April Christie Carter Eliason's Inside A Raven Conspiracy will be on display at The Red Mug in Superior. You can learn more about the artist here in our February interview.

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"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."

--Langston Hughes

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.

Ten Lessons from a Picture Puzzle

Susie had been working on a puzzle that we had gotten for Christmas & I spent an evening helping. Within minutes I had an insight about achievement. Susie said making the puzzle had triggered all kinds of insights. Here are just a few of the lessons she gained by working the puzzle.

1) Start with frame. It’s almost impossible to put a complex puzzle together without doing the edges first. Life, the great puzzle, is more easily worked out when you first build a framework for putting it together.

2) Work areas that are obvious first. You focus on specific tasks. The red wagon. The blue door. Don’t worry about other parts of the puzzle. They will become easier to do later when the pieces around it are assembled.

3) Sometimes it seems like critical pieces are missing. But in truth they are all there, though we don’t always recognize them when we first see them.

4) Sometimes others help us. Their fresh perspective helps us see things we hadn’t seen before and thus moves us forward.

5) Sometimes it seems there are too many pieces. They can’t all fit in this picture, can they?

6) Christina (our daughter) came along and put in a piece. Even a child can see solutions at times that we miss.

7) Puzzles are put together one piece at a time. Achievement is a series of small successes.

8) Persistence is necessary in order to succeed.

9) It’s not arbitrary. You are following a pattern. Life works better when we have role models and people to pattern our lives after.

10) When a piece doesn’t fit, you can’t keep jamming it in trying to force it. Kids learn this at an early age, but many adults seem never to have learned this lesson.

January 22, 1994