What Does It Mean When God Sends a Cardinal? A Reminder of His Care, Not a Sign From the Dead

The Bible never mentions the cardinal, a bird of the Americas the biblical writers never saw, and no church teaches that a cardinal is a sign from God, an angel or someone who has died. What Scripture does promise is plainer: not one sparrow falls “without your Father,” and “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 10:29; 5:4).

The idea that a cardinal carries a message from heaven is a popular belief, passed on in sayings such as the line that cardinals appear when angels are near. If you have lost someone and a red bird at the window has comforted you, that comfort is real, and nothing here takes it away. Jesus gives us a better way to see the bird, though. “Behold the fowls of the air,” he said; “your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” (Matthew 6:26). The cardinal at your feeder is not your loved one; it is one of the birds God feeds, and the God who feeds it has not forgotten you either.

No, and Scripture never tells the living to look for messages from the dead. When someone in one of Jesus’ parables asks for a messenger from the dead, he is turned down. The rich man, now in torment, begs Abraham to send the poor man Lazarus to warn his five brothers. Abraham answers, “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.” When the rich man insists that “if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent,” Abraham replies, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:29–31). Abraham sends the brothers back to the Scriptures they already have; God’s word is enough.

Long before that parable, the law of Moses had forbidden seeking out the dead. Among the practices Israel must refuse, Deuteronomy names “a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer” (Deuteronomy 18:11). Isaiah answers people who urged that kind of search with a question: “should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?” (Isaiah 8:19), meaning, should people ask the dead on behalf of the living? When King Saul went to “a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor” (1 Samuel 28:7), Scripture names it among the reasons he died: he was “asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit, to enquire of it; And enquired not of the Lord” (1 Chronicles 10:13–14). The Catechism of the Catholic Church likewise rejects “conjuring up the dead” (2116).

Noticing a bird in the garden is nothing like those practices, and if a cardinal has comforted you, you have done no wrong. The danger begins only when the bird is treated as the person who died, or as a way to reach them.

Clarissa Moll, a Christian writer who has lost her husband, knows this from the inside. She lists cardinals among the things grieving people take for signs and writes that “there is no secret language that transcends death.” She thinks of him whenever she sees a mountain, she says, and takes the mountains as a picture of God’s nearness rather than her husband’s.

Where does Christian hope for the dead rest?

Our hope for those who have died rests on Christ’s promise and on nothing else. When Martha’s brother Lazarus died (a different Lazarus from the poor man in the parable), Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26). Paul wrote to the Thessalonians so that they would “sorrow not, even as others which have no hope,” and gave the reason: “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him” (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14). So we grieve, but we grieve with hope, and for the one left behind the psalm says, “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:18).

What can you do when a cardinal reminds you of someone?

When a red bird brings someone to mind, let it turn you to prayer. The bird itself carries nothing from the one who died, but God can use any moment to draw a grieving person toward him. Say the person’s name to God, thank him for them, and tell him what you miss. If you need words to begin with, there are prayers for the loss of a loved one.

Christians differ over praying for the dead: the Catholic Church offers prayers for them (Catechism 958), while the Westminster Confession, held by Presbyterian and other Reformed churches, teaches that prayer is for the living, “but not for the dead” (21.4). Where Christians do pray for the dead, that prayer is spoken to God, not passed through a bird.

God made the cardinal, but Scripture never treats it, or any bird, as a message from him. So why does it seem to show up at just the right moment? Partly it is because the bird is always close by. The northern cardinal lives across the eastern United States, into southern Canada, and south through Mexico to Guatemala and Belize, far from the lands where the Bible was written. It does not migrate, and as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology puts it, “Nearly any bird feeder you put out ought to attract Northern Cardinals” within their range. So the bird stays near houses all year, bright red against winter snow, and many people see one at the moments that matter to them.

Jesus pointed to birds to show God’s care, and that is the help a cardinal can give us too. In Luke he said of sparrows, “not one of them is forgotten before God,” and added, “Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Luke 12:6–7). A cardinal at the feeder can do for you what those sparrows did for Jesus’ hearers: it is a creature God feeds, and it can remind you that he knows you.

The cardinal appears nowhere in Scripture, and the sayings about cardinals, angels and loved ones watching over us are not Bible verses. What people are usually looking for are the words Jesus spoke about small birds: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:29–31). Others are gathered in these Bible verses about birds, from Noah’s dove to Elijah’s ravens.

Scripture gives a red bird no meaning, though red and scarlet do appear in some important passages, and a cardinal may bring them to mind. Through Isaiah, God says, “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18). When the spies left Jericho, they told Rahab, “thou shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window,” and to gather her family into her house (Joshua 2:18). If a red bird on the snow brings forgiveness or rescue to mind, that is a good use of the moment, even though the colour itself carries no message.

The bird is named after the cardinals of the Catholic Church. In the words of the Missouri Department of Conservation, “Both common and scientific names reflect the fact that this bird was named for the red robes and caps worn by Roman Catholic cardinals.” The church title is far older than the bird’s name and has nothing to do with birds. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 traces it to priests who belonged to “a central or episcopal church, an ecclesiastical cardo,” and cardo is the Latin word for a hinge. In many languages the bird simply carries the same church title, often with the word for red added. The name only describes the colour of its feathers and gives the bird no office in the Church.

Is the red-crested cardinal a different bird?

In Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil, the common name meaning cardinal belongs to another bird altogether, the red-crested cardinal (Paroaria coronata), which “gets its common name from its red head and prominent crest,” according to Cornell’s Birds of the World. It is native to northern Argentina, Bolivia, southern Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and has been introduced to Hawaii and Puerto Rico. What we have said of the northern cardinal holds for this one too: Scripture never mentions either bird, and neither carries a message from God or from the dead.

There is one, but it comes from the Cherokee people rather than from the Bible or the Church. Cherokee storytellers of the eastern band gave it to the ethnologist James Mooney, who followed mainly the telling of Swimmer, with parts from John Ax, James Blythe and others, and printed it in Myths of the Cherokee (U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, 1902). Mooney wrote that “The redbird, tatsu’hwa, is believed to have been originally the daughter of the Sun.” In the story, seven men carry the Sun’s dead daughter home from the Ghost country in a box they were told not to open. When they lift the lid, she escapes as a redbird, and that, the story says, is why the dead cannot be brought back. Mooney counted it among the principal myths of the Cherokee, and it belongs to their tradition rather than to Christian teaching.

A cardinal that taps or flies at the same window day after day is defending its territory against its own reflection. The Cornell Lab describes “a cardinal attacking its reflection in a window, car mirror, or shiny bumper,” most often in spring and early summer, and explains that “When they see their own reflection in your window, they assume they’re seeing a competitor and attack the image.” Both males and females do it, and it usually stops within a few weeks. If you want it to stop, Cornell advises, “To get rid of the reflection, you must alter the outside of the window.” The bird is not trying to bring news or get in, and the same is true of any bird hitting or tapping on your window.

It is only a small red bird, guarding its patch of garden, fed by the same Father who numbers the hairs of your head. “Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:31).

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