By Pastor Steven Wright
April 30th marks the 200th anniversary of Louisiana’s statehood. In honor of this bicentennial year, I recently purchased a Louisiana state flag to fly from our home’s front 
porch. The central figure on the flag is a pelican feeding her young. While many know the brown pelican is the state bird, few may know the history of this image — an image rich in Christian association.
An ancient legend states that in times of famine, a mother pelican would pierce her breast in order to feed her young with her own blood. According to another version of the story, the mother pelican would pour her blood over her dead young to bring them back to life. As early as the second century, this legendary act of the pelican was seen as an allegory of the work of Christ who shed His blood to grant spiritual life to His own. In the Middle Ages, Dante in his Paradisio refers to Christ as “our Pelican,” and Thomas Aquinas writes in a hymn (“Adoro te devote”):
Pelican of mercy, Jesu, Lord and God,
Cleanse me, wretched sinner, in Thy Precious Blood.
Medieval churches often featured Pelican imagery in carvings and other artworks because of this Christological association.
The image of the pelican wounding herself to feed her young became known as “the Pelican in her piety.” The act was described as the pelican vulning (from Latin, vulno, to wound) herself. In addition to representing Christ, the image was seen as symbolic of charity and self-sacrifice generally. Thus, Shakespeare includes these lines in Hamlet:
To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms
And, like the kind life-rendering pelican,
Repast them with my blood.
Laertes here employs pelican imagery to express willingness to give up his life for his late father’s friends.
Such background, both religious and secular, informs the use of the pelican image on the Louisiana state flag. A number of variations on the flag design have existed through the years, some including drops of blood and some not. The legislature passed a law in 2006 mandating the flag depict the pelican “tearing its breast to feed its young” and include “an appropriate display of three drops of blood.” A newly designed flag meeting these requirements was introduced in 2010 (see image above).
Presumably, the message intended by the image of the pelican vulning itself is that our state government is willing to make self-sacrifice in the interest of its citizens. That is a noble ideal indeed, especially in a day marked by politics as a means of self-aggrandizement. It is also a Biblical notion. In a prophetic image of the way things ought to be, Isaiah declares:
Kings shall be your foster fathers,
And their queens your nursing mothers. (Isaiah 49:23)
God intends civil rulers to have a parental attitude of love, concern, and self-sacrifice toward those over whom they rule. Louisiana’s flag reminds us of this principle. Let us pray the Lord would be pleased to give us civic officials at every level of government that put this principle into practice. In our present political climate, the parties of the elephant and of the donkey could both learn some lessons from the pelican!
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