#iritation

Many years ago I came across a parable, attributed to Søren Kierkegaard. I've long since forgotten where I encountered it, and even the medium. It goes something like this:

There is a land of ducks. Every Sunday the ducks wake from their duck beds, leave their duck houses, and waddle to duck church. The duck preacher addresses his flock.

“Ducks!” he yells. “God has given us wings! Wings which allow us to fly, to soar on the winds above the dirty ground where other creatures are forced to remain. Let us give thanks for this wonderful gift.”

And the congregation all quacks, “Amen!”

And they all waddle home, without lifting a single wing.

I am not a Kierkegaard expert. At the time, I had been reading some of his work for a class. This parable, easily grasped, and almost light-hearted, struck me as inconsistent with the mood of things I'd been reading (things with titles like Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death do not lead my mind to anthropomorphized ducks).

With this conflict in mind I set out to fact check this parable. Internet searches show it in a lot of sermon notes, some random blog posts, and at least three books. Whenever any citation is given, which isn't often, it leads back to one man, Tony Campolo (note: Tony Campolo is not a dead danish philosopher with a penchant for publishing pseudonymous works).

Dr. Campolo included this tale in his book Let me Tell You a Story. I haven't read its entirety. Thanks to Google books, I have read the parable in question1, and the notes at the end of the book, which do not cite any work of Kierkegaard's or any secondary source. Every year or so I end up spending an evening looking for both references to this parable, and full texts of Kierkegaard’s work to search for ducks. It has yet to yield anything older than Dr. Campolo’s 1985 book We have Met the Enemy and They are Partly Right (which also contains no citation for the story).2

Of even greater irritation is since then the parable has been reprinted in another book by Dr. Campolo, which does include a proper citation… of his first book.3 Several years ago a friend was at a conference Dr. Campolo was speaking at. I had her ask for a source for the duck parable. I don't now recall what he said the source was (possibly Fear and Trembling?), but I ran out and grabbed it from the college library. There were no ducks.

At this point, I don’t really care where the story originated, Kierkegaard, Tony Campolo, some mysterious third party. I would just like to know, so if anyone does know, could you tell me? I would also like people to start citing things properly, but that seems like a lot to ask.

Campolo, A. Let Me Tell You a Story, (Nashville: Word 2000), 81.

Campolo, A. We have Met The Enemy and They Are Partly Right, (Dallas: Word 1985), 78.