Life isn’t like a box of chocolates. It’s like a box of angels and drunken ducks.
It’s a metaphor for the world and the natural and supernatural state of human beings.
A brief back story. 1983, my wife and I are newly-wed and newly transferred from NJ to Los Angeles. We take a day and visit Ensenada where we buy these little figures from a young street vendor. They are a trio of drunken ducks. First Christmas, we have a tree and no ornaments. We put the drunken ducks on the tree thinking we are pretty darn funny.
Years roll on, we have children, grow in our faith, we add ornaments to the box marked “Christmas stuff” including religious themed ornaments like angels.
Fast forward, one our kids, thinking it was hilarious put all the angels and the three drunken ducks (now 43 years old themselves) into the same box and marked it “Angels and Drunken Ducks”. Humor runs in the family apparently.
We just packed up our Christmas ornaments this past weekend. I saw the box with new eyes , in light of my current work of helping C-Level executives and business owners integrate their faith life into their work life. The box of angels and drunken ducks is a metaphor for life on earth.
Those drunken ducks represent to me our worldly, fallen nature. Saint Augustine describes himself in these terms in a prayer to God to help him with his list of faults which included his tendency to be and I paraphrase –
- wicked
- perverse
- irascible
- prideful
- impatient
- harsh
- disobedient
- anxious
- bitter
- cruel
Let’s add to the list envy, spiritually indifferent, greedy, lustful, and gluttonous as well. You get the point.
The angels represent the supernatural state we are all called to be – holy. Saint Augustine also in his same prayer included the opposing supernatural actions to counter our tendency to follow our “default”, natural, fallen state. He prayed that with God’s help he would live a life marked with of goodness, meekness, mildness, humility, patience, benignity, obedience, tranquility, sweetness, and charity to others.
The world has been, continues to be and always will be filled with both angels and drunken ducks. Every leader navigates a world full of both – in their communities, the organizations they lead, their families, and their own hearts. The work given to us in our vocation is choosing, again and again, to become the kind of person others are inspired to be as well and to work on changing their own duck-like behaviors and to follow the path towards the “angels”.
