This bird of paradise shall whisper into the ear of her namesake.

Yahweh said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of Yahweh,
For Yahweh is about to pass by.”
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart
and shattered the rocks before Yahweh,
but Yahweh was not in the wind.
After the wind there was an earthquake,
but Yahweh was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake came a fire,
but Yahweh was not in the fire.
And after the fire came a gentle whisper.    1 Kings 19:11, 12

Dear friends, now we are children of God,
and what we will be has not yet been made known.
But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.    1 John 3:2

What place do these creatures or creatures of sheer fantasy have in the art of Christiandom? —a tradition that is both Biblically grounded and aesthetically important.   The Biblical tradition seems uniquely hospitable to radical fiction, to purely fantastical works that make no pretense of being real, but that exist as what Tolkien describes as subcreations of the human imagination.  Authors who have tried to be explicitly Christian in their works have often favored the genre of fantasy.  Consider Edmund Spenser, John Bunyan, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle.  This literary tradition began in the Middle Ages with the tales of knights, allegorical fantasies and fairy tales.