King David | CURIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I have a friend who likes to read manuals. I mean by this the instruction manual that might come with your television, your hair dryer, or even you dog shampoo. Though I feel that this is a very strange habit, lest he should be reading this and be even marginally insulted—and lest you, dear reader, should share this same penchant (for perhaps there are more who have this predilection than I am aware)—let me say that I am not here to condemn the enterprise, however strange I may find it to be.

I confess that I myself am of the opposite camp. I am one of those people who, when on the rare occasion that they might buy something that includes a manual, reads it not one whit. I rush to judgment about how this piece obviously goes here, that piece there. The result: I must often take the item apart after I’ve constructed it because I put it together all wrong. And thus, I am always later forced to concede (normally to my wife), that reading the manual first would have been a good idea, however boring it might have seemed at the time.

Indeed, there is great value in reading “boring stuff.” Some might call I Chronicles boring. In case you’ve not read it lately, the opening chapters consist of lengthy genealogies, names of human beings who lived and loved and laughed long ago. They had families, saw their children take their first steps, celebrated birthdays, enjoyed religious festivals, ravenously devoured a good meal, opened the door for the elderly, and taught their children life lessons. They danced, read aloud to their families (probably every evening), sang songs, and prayed fervently. They had lives. We have but their names, names in a list. And those jewish-festival names are the only ones we have, for their were many, many more than those, both alluded to in I Chronicles or mentioned as being part of a larger group—not by name, but merely as one in a thousand. And they have the same kind of lives that I just expounded upon above.

But what has this to do with reading boring stuff, you might ask? Well, I will put it simply: it’s one thing to read any document piecemeal, whether the best parts of the Bible or The Brothers Karamazov or the Oedipus Rex or even a modern novel, of which we all know it’s not cool to read the ending first. Dante only makes sense if you know Paradiso comes after Purgatorio, and Purgatorio after Inferno. The amendments to the Constitution only make sense if we have some idea of what the Constitution says. The boring stuff in life—the job we are not too fond of because it is “no fun,” the season of our marriage that is difficult, the décor of our living area that really, really needs to be replaced sometime soon—provide a necessary function in our lives, for these things give us, albeit obliquely and paradoxically, hope, something to look forward to. We hope, even have faith that the rough patch will pass and our relationship will get better; we appreciate time with our family more in part perhaps because our job environment is less than felicitous; we look forward to the day when we can haul that couch out the front door an put a “FREE” sign on it—and then, fifteen minutes later we, incredulous, see someone pull up with their truck and haul it away.

While reading I Chronicles is not precisely analogous to that, it is perhaps just a little bit so, and that’s why I like to read it. In fact, I like to read the whole Bible straight on through in the KJV; I am not sure precisely why I like that version, save that I enjoy, even in the vast tracts of prosaic narrative, its prosody. I realize that my saying that I read through it directly may sound strange. Yet I actually like knowing what the whole document has to say, and there is no better way to discern that than to read through it directly. And, yes, that takes a while.

So, when you hit a boring patch, you keep reading. And you try to imagine what that boring patch really means. It means people lived then, they really did live, and they had the same fears for the future—actually, likely a much higher order of fear—than we do now. They saw a change in leadership often coming only after spilled blood, not a democratic election. They worried because someone named David had been anointed as the new king of Israel. King Saul had fallen on Mount Gilboa. They had no idea if their government would stand, what the future held.

So, I encourage those who like to read boring stuff, to keep right on doing so. Generally speaking, at least when it comes to manuals, I am not of that ilk. Nevertheless, I encourage those of us who do not like to read boring stuff to consider indulging, at least for a season, in something like I Chronicles, for in its apparently boring narrative, we can find things that will encourage and inspire us to laugh, love and live courageously in an uncertain age. Boring stuff doesn’t just belong in a case or sitting on a library shelf. It belongs to our hearts and in our minds. Here’s to “boring.”

↓ NOT Boring Stuff ↓

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The topic of this week’s blog may appear, at first blush, a bit unlikely, for perhaps you’re wondering who would be so pretentious as to blog about the meaning of life? I must be kidding, right?

But I’m not. Rather, it donned on me (the meaning of life, I mean), when I saw a picture of a sheep named Christopher in the news. According to the Associated Press article, the poor fellow was lost for several years in the Australian scrubland—a land I had never hitherto known existed—and, when his wool was removed, it yielded roughly 89 pounds of the stuff. The article said it was about half the body weight of the animal. That’s a hefty animal and a lot of yarn. Such an amount of wool apparently can provide one sweater each for thirty people.

And that’s when it donned on me: I’d stumbled upon the meaning of life. And it’s not merely because I like sheep and can, thanks to Elaine Jakes’ having bought a farm (ch. 9 of The Curious Autobiography) when I was but a teenager, do a near perfect sheep voice imitation. Wherever I go, sheep are seriously impressed when I make a bleating sound (which, I’ve been told, echoes all too well the female mating-call). Nor is it because I happen to have been to Reykjavik, where I’ve seen and smelled some of the finest woolen sweaters in the world, sweaters that themselves still rather smell like sheep. (As I was but a student at the time, I hadn’t the money to purchase one; besides, it is normally far too hot in Texas to wear one). Nor is it because it is a Welsh family tradition to celebrate Easter with a meal of lamb. Nor is it because I am interested in metaphoric vocabulary derived from animal behavior: bull-headed (rather Minotaurish, isn’t it?); creepy (centipedish); catty (how fitting is that one?); jackass (need I say more?); mule-headed (definitely referring to the mentality); piggish (if you’ve seen a pig eat, you’d understand); rabbity (perhaps my favorite); birdlike (a bit too obvious, though “featherweight” is rather nice); squirrelly (entirely self-evident); lion-hearted (too little used any more); and, of course, sheepish. Yet I need not mention that one. And obviously none of these, nice as they are, sheds any light on the meaning of life. Rather, only this heavy-laden sheep does.

Now before I should dare divulge life’s meaning we need to consider something about sheep that is sometimes deemed offensive and certainly, among the most vociferous of sheep-rights activists, politically incorrect in the telling (non rectum reipublicae dictu). No, I do not mean to say here that sheep are stupid. That is a cliché; besides, to tell the truth, sheep have actually come out better than expected on their aptitude tests. There is no sense in perpetuating a false stereotype.

Besides, I would prefer to rehearse some interesting facts about sheep of which one might simply be unaware. First, even after many years, they have a remarkable memory, like elephants; they can also show emotion more readily than many other animals. And, apparently they can remember (or they know instinctively) which medicinal plants to eat when they are ill. Finally, they can even recognize (or at least mother ewes can) the bleat of their own offspring. In other words, sheep may not seem very much like us, but in many ways they are.

Which brings us back to the meaning of life. Before we can state in a mere blog in 1500 words or less what the meaning of life is, we must establish that sheep, like humans, no matter how stupid they may seem—and if one reads the news, it is not difficult to discover that we humans, even to our fellow human beings, can seem very stupid—are in fact not unintelligent. They are, in that sense, humanlike. I shan’t be sheepish about stating it plainly: a sheep can provide a very apt metaphor for a human being.

Unless we bear that in mind, we can’t discover the meaning of life, nor can we understand William Blake when he writes:

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & bid thee feed.

By the stream & o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice!

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek & he is mild,

He became a little child:

I a child & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

William Blake, "The Lamb," from Songs of Innocence and Experience — William Blake, “The Lamb,” from Songs of Innocence and Experience

Blake, in his second most memorable poem—“The Tyger” being the most memorable, though “Jerusalem” is my favorite—long before the sheep intelligence study of scientists here tells us the same thing that the scientists have confirmed, namely that sheep are very much like human beings. When he writes “By the stream, and o’er the mead,” it is hard not to detect an allusion to the green pastures and still waters of the twenty-third Psalm, a poem that perhaps needs no introduction for most readers .

Both poems, Blake’s and King David’s, point in the same direction. They point toward the meaning of life. They suggest it, without quite stating it. But the oversized wandering Australian sheep perhaps says it better than even the psalm or Blake, or any scientific study about sheep, even the I.Q. test on which the sheep—and I assume there was more than one of them, for otherwise the results could be skewed, if Albert Einstein sheep happened to be the sole test-taker—out-performed, presumably, cows, goats and gazelles. And so it is that the sheep in question, the living Chia-pet king of wooliness, Chris, by his mere presence said, when he wandered back in sight of humankind, “I need help. Can you please shear me?”

And that is the answer to the riddle, “What is the meaning of life?” As without help Chris would surely have died, crushed under his own coat, the answer must be that we need each other; that we must help each other. We were born to do that. We reproduce, look after babies and care for our families simply to fulfill that unspoken charge. Many of us will be blessed to care for (sic) aging parents for whom we are privileged to do that. If we are living correctly, our lives won’t so much be about ourselves as about others. We will take the time to sheer each other’s wool, to gather it, to make sweaters for the poor; we will take the time to love each other from the heart. The world tells us “You, and you alone, matter, and you can do whatever you want in this moment.” But then it turns right around and says, “Get with the system, do the trendy.” The unstated premise is simply that so long as you stay current and don’t look back to the past or forward to the future, you’ll be okay.

But Chris the wandering sheep tells us something else. He says, “Remember me.” He says, “Help me.” He says, “Let me have a future, don’t let me die.” He also says, and Blake says it for him (and for the tiger), “The one who made you, made me; we are in this thing called life together.”

Yet I don’t mean to imply mere mammalian reciprocity. Again, the world might just settle for a bit of that. But Chris’ story is different: he is not offering reciprocity but is providing a metaphor for the relationship of the human and divine. Chris needs our help, and the mere fact that he exists demonstrates to us what we were made for and that we, too, have needs that only someone higher than us, in our case much higher, can fulfill. Our existence, our pathos, sorrow, grief, wretchedness, and—dare I say it?—sin shows our deficiency in the same way the Chris’ wool shows his ever-waxing need. How ironic, then, that Blake’s little ditty suggest, too, that the lamb should be, like King David in his youth (or a still greater king), a child.

You may yet be wondering about the meaning of life. In case I haven’t been clear, I shall be now. It is, from one point of view, denying yourself to serve others. From the other point of view, it is, simply put, acknowledging how wooly life can get. Blake says the rest; if you don’t like Blake, take heart, you’ll get another crack at it: Christmas season is just around the corner, the stuff of another blog—rather a series of blogs about life once upon a time in a little town beneath a great arbor. In the meantime, whether with a ringer’s precision[1] or snagger’s compassion,[2] he who has Wolseley’s[3] to shear, let him shear.

[1] Quickest shearer; cf. https://www.facebook.com/ipaustralia.gov.au/posts/528059677247932.

[2] Slowest shearer.

[3] Electric shears.