Black-billed Magpies : Growing Pains
Black-billed Magpies
These are Black-billed Magpies. One is an insatiable juvenile, the other its parent. These birds are always squawkers, but this hungry child elevated things to a whole new level. Moments earlier, I’d watched the baby nearly swallow its parent’s head as food was transferred from beak to beak. I was almost moved to laughter by the ceaseless insistence of the “feed me!” calls and the parent’s “enough already” look. My own hazy memories of that stage of parenting, and even hazier memories of childhood, all came rushing to the fore. This dynamic of parent and child, even playing out in a completely different species, still resonates in a meaningful way. I felt for them, navigating the journey from dependence to being self-sustaining.
The Bible realistically depicts the Israelites’ maturation from a body of slaves to a nation ready to live under a Divine constitution. The forty-year journey is consistently punctuated with complaints. There’s no food. There’s no water. We miss fish and leeks and onions. Why does Moses get to make all the decisions? We don’t want to face monsters in Canaan. Even Miriam and Aaron question their baby brother’s decision-making along the way. And Moses - understandably, humanly - alternately pleads for this stiff-necked people and is utterly exasperated by them. This transitional, adolescent period reveals the contradictory nature of wanting everything provided - and also exercising agency.
Thousands of years after the Exodus, we experience these same tensions. Western democracies offer the infrastructure of participatory decision-making. We vote for presidents - for our countries and our neighborhood associations. We elect leaders - for our largest companies and smallest non-profits. So perforce we ask ourselves: Where are we? Are we stepping up into leadership roles? Or complaining from the sidelines that the leaders aren’t doing what we want? Are we exercising our rights, jealously guarding them, or abdicating responsibility to (self-designated) experts to act on our behalf? The Magpies were a study in both maturation and squawking. Which of those do we emphasize in our lives?