Isn’t Stellaluna a lovely story? It comes with real depths of meaning.

Consider how, midway through the story, Stellaluna is joyfully reunited with Mama Bat and her bat family. Now, as I was reflecting on this reunion, I confess that I found myself wondering, But why does Stellaluna return to her bird brothers? Living with birds, after all, meant eating yucky bugs; living with birds meant not being allowed to hang upside-down; living with birds meant not flying at night. In short, living with birds pushed Stellaluna to live against the grain of what felt natural; and she found herself doing things that were beyond her comfort zone. At least she could share flying with the birds; bats and birds both fly. But, let’s be honest: it was a pure matter of chance that Stellaluna came to live with her bird brothers to begin with. And it would not have been a shameful thing at all for Stellaluna to have obeyed Mama Bird’s demands because to do otherwise might have threatened her survival. She went along with Mama Bird’s demands in order to stay alive. 

That’s what I found myself wondering. And so, if Stellaluna’s relationship with Mama Bird and her bird brothers was merely utilitarian–only a matter of surviving–then, having found her “real” family of bats, why not just stay with them, fly far away with them, and never see Pip, Flitter, and Flap ever again? 

Stellaluna could have. 

But she didn’t. Immediately following her joyful reunion, she felt driven to share this joy with her bird brothers. And you know, the desire to share joy is not utilitarian. It’s not about mere survival. “Come with me and meet my bat family!” she says, and Pip speaks for everyone when he replies, without hesitation, “Okay, let’s go.” 

This is a real spark of deep meaning, in this children’s picture book. It illuminates what it means to live in a spirit of love. To live in a spirit of love is to be willing to do things that may feel unnatural to you because you want to connect with another–as when the birds tried to fly in the dark, or when Stellaluna ate bugs. To be a bird in cultural bat space requires a lot of emotional work. To be a bat in cultural bird space requires a lot of emotional work. There will be awkwardness. 

But you do it for love. 

Consider how this might apply in the real-life human realm. If the differences are truly innocent, love calls for appreciation even though it might get awkward. For example, a million years ago when I was a member of a Church of Christ congregation (which happened to be predominantly white), I’ll never forget the time I accompanied my pastor to attend, across town, a predominantly black Church of Christ congregation. It was so different and I felt awkward in my cultural whiteness and I couldn’t believe that the service soared past the 60 minute mark without any apologies whatsoever. My home Church of Christ, white as it was, insisted that for worship services, 60 minutes was the absolute hard stopping point. This, even though a lot of those same white folks were football fans and let me tell you, when a football game exceeded the regular 4th quarter and went into overtime, they couldn’t get excited enough. But why should people consider a sporting event more important than a worship service? I came away with the personal opinion that black church space–at least where the question of duration is concerned–has the better deal. Neither is morally right or wrong though. The difference between 60-minute church culture and more-than-60 minute church culture is just like the difference between bats and birds. It’s innocent–and the work of love is to learn how to appreciate something even as it might go against the grain of what feels “normal.”.  

Love makes us willing to do the emotional work. 

The story of Stellaluna is a parable about loving friendships and chosen families that transcend mere utility. Love builds the bridge. Our social identities need not be walls that separate us from others. Our social identities add so much richness to our lives. But they need not, ultimately, be prisons. 

Love can build a bridge. 

But now, note especially the role of Mama Bird in the story. This strikes yet another spark of wisdom. Remember, early on, how Stellaluna still liked to sleep hanging by her feet? She’d hang from the nest. When Mama Bird was away, Pip, Flitter, and Flap got curious and decided to enter into bat space–to be like bats. It was probably quite disorienting. But they were curious. They loved Stellaluna and wanted to know what it was like to be her. So, when Mama Bird returned, she saw “eight tiny feet gripping the edge of the nest.” That’s when Mama Bird freaked out. She ordered them all to get back to what was “natural” for birds. And Mama read Stellaluna the riot act. Mama would allow Stellaluna to live with them only if she committed to living solely in bird space. She’d have to leave her bat self at the door, so to speak, to come inside. 

What Mama Bird did, essentially, was make an innocent difference bad. She essentially introduced bias and oppression into the relationship between birds and bats. Both identities can’t be ok. It has to be just one or the other. A painful example of this in real life is how intolerant cis-gender spaces can be. Transgender Day of Remembrance is an important and sad testimony to this. Intolerant cis-gender spaces demand homogeneity. They are patrolled by shrill voices which sound a lot like Mama Bird’s. 

It’s so tragic. Think of how we see these oppressive dynamics happening politically. Just as Mama Bird invokes the possibility of disaster when she sees her babies hanging upside down by their feet (“You’re going to fall and break your necks!”), so we have politicians who threaten dire things about the consequences of immigration. The tragic history of the extermination and forced removal of Native Americans is yet another terrible example of this–so terrible that it has permanently spoiled Thanksgiving Day for some. Think also of the rampant misinformation and alarmism we saw not too long ago, from opponents of Issue #1, who, like Mama Bird, want women to leave significant parts of themselves at the door as the price of living in patriarchal, Christian nationalistic space….

But this is not the only form that the bigoted and catastrophizing voice of Mama Bird can take. It can also occur as whispered gossip in smaller communities, when something different emerges. As in, when the community majority is used to eating bugs but along comes this person who prefers mangos. 

Mangoes!?

And then there’s the judgy superego voice that resides within each of us, a critical inner voice, which comes from being socialized into American culture. How we are not the right height, the right body shape, the right skin color, the right age, the right this or the right that, and so the critical inner Mama Bird voice condemns and condemns. 

It turns out that Stellaluna–this sweet children’s picture book–is not only a parable of how love risks doing the difficult work of building bridges between differences. It’s also a parable about the forces beyond us and within us that make innocent differences bad, and build bias and oppression into things. 

And this picture book story–the story of Stellaluna–speaks to one more thing: how friendships across different identities (bats with birds, birds with bats) can be uncertain and risky. 

Just think of how the story ends. The voice of Mama Bird is nowhere to be heard. Mama Bat is absent also. It’s just Pip, Flitter, Flap, and Stellaluna. Stellaluna, after the reunion with her mom and fellow bats, returns to her bird brothers because she wants to share her joy. And the birds share in it! The birds want to go meet Stellaluna’s bat family. More joy to share!

This is when the birds take the risk of entering into cultural bat space and trying on behaviors that don’t come naturally to them. They do it out of love. The birds hang upside down by their feet. Then the birds fly at night. They try to follow Stellaluna but they discover they can’t see a thing. Stellaluna sees that they are going to crash, so she rescues them. She grabs her friends, lifts them to a tree, the birds grasp a branch, Stellaluna hangs from a limb above them and covers them with her wings. 

Then comes this profound dialogue: 

“How can we be so different and feel so much alike?” mused Flitter. “And how can we feel so different and be so much alike?” wondered Pip. 

“I think this is quite a mystery,” Flap chirped. 

“I agree,” said Stellalluna. “But we’re friends. And that’s a fact.”

And that’s where the story ends. Uncertainly. What happens next? Do they wait until day and continue all the way to visit the bat family? If so, what will that look like? Will Mama Bat berate Stellaluna for her recklessness? And then, when the birds return home, imagine the punishment Mama Bird will deal out to them. 

The story ends uncertainly. The world just likes its divisions: it takes innocent differences and creates insiders vs. outsiders, saved vs. damned, bats vs. birds. 

West Shore, here’s what I believe: our community is an opportunity for bats and birds to come together and experience love. “We need not think alike to love alike.” We also don’t have to all be culturally alike to love alike. For example, why can’t we sometimes exceed the 60 minute service, if the spirit is flowing? Why can’t this worship space sometimes echo black culture too? 

With the way it ends, so uncertainly, it’s almost as if the Stellaluna story is asking the reader to finish the story. To do this with how they live their own life. You are the one who completes the story of Stellaluna, Pip, Flitter, and Flap. The story is completed by you. 

So, live the kind of life that honors the innocence of different identities and refuses to make these innocent differences bad things. Be the kind of community that sustains loving friendships between bats and birds, transgender folks and cis-gender folks, whites and people of color, and on and on. The world hates that. The world wants to pervert that. Truly unique forms of love are thus lost from this earth.

Don’t let that happen.

Don’t let it. 

Allow love to do its work of building bridges. 

Do it for love. 

Happy Thanksgiving!