Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits - and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!




You know, when Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam composed those lines in the 11th century (or rather when he composed the Persian originals of those lines for which the English author Edward Fitzgerald later vouchsafed the world this famous 19th-century translation) it's a safe bet that he wasn't thinking about cows and gorillas (*see editor's note below), or even the animal kingdom as a whole, for that matter. Yes, these are the lines of a wistful revolutionary wannabe on the subject of love, but of decidedly human love for decidedly human beings, albeit a love whose corporeal nirvanas seem to give us tantalizing glimpses of transcendence of the very physical world from which they emanate.



Oh, dear, now I'm in trouble. I just saw Widow Brimley in the front pew here rolling her eyes. Work with me here, Widow, I'm about to come to the main point. (Or, as the equally under-appreciated Polonius once laconically quipped in order to extort a similar patience from Queen Gertrude: "Madam, stay a while: I will be faithful.")



Now then, where was I? Oh, yes:



But despite the fact that Omar's "Heart's Desire" is obviously anthropocentric (or rather that the philosophical "content" of that desire is meant to be calculated from the anthropocentric point of view) his quatrain, considered more broadly, hints at (or at least retrospectively seems to "celebrate") a far more inclusive revolution, one in which agape love replaces corporal love and the animal kingdom as a whole replaces Humankind.



Great. Now I've lost everybody! I'll tell you what, let me come at this thing from a less abstract angle, yes? (Honestly, this sermon of mine seemed so straightforward last night when I was practicing it in front of the full-length mirror on my bedroom door, sawing the air with a variety of potentially useful hand gestures, the more promising of which, as you may have noticed, I've already begun employing judiciously this morning as circumstances warrant.)




Right. Father O'Really's Sermon for the morning of July 13, 2007: Take two!



Several years ago, brethren (you, too, sistren), I found myself in the unapologetically rural town of Timberville, in the northwestern portion of Virginia, whither I had resolved to take my then-5-year-old niece to see a dairy farm: a certain Shenville Creamery and Garden Market at the end of Evergreen Road, one of those "twistified," narrow, and verdure-lined country roads that a city dweller like myself almost forgets are still in existence, surrounded as one is on a daily basis with high-rises and multi-laned interstate highways.



Tragically (if you ask me) the then-four-year-old creamery was forced into bankruptcy in 2004, but that's one whole sermon in itself: namely, on the evils of the Enron business mentality in corporate America, whereby cynical manipulation is rewarded rather than good old-fashioned day after day back-breaking labor. (Listen, don't get me started.)



Anywhoo...



Long story short, right? We take the dairy tour and then my niece and I rush out back to see the cows.



And here's the point, Widow Brimley, because it's at this point that I suddenly had my revelation. See, I looked into the eyes of this particular calf....



Well, now, we've all heard the expression "cow-eyed," right, referring to that soulful quality in the peepers of our bovine friends, a quality with which any attentive first-time close-up observer of cattle is inevitably struck.



Remember, now, I'm a city boy, so I had never been eye-to-eye with a cow before. (Well, there was that one despotic landlady back in the '70s, but... No, seriously, seriously!)



Anyway, we were eye to eye, right? and the old girl was batting those baby blues at me -- or in this case those baby browns.



I want to tell you, it was downright eerie, the matter-of-fact intimacy of those all-too-kindly eyes. It's hard to explain, but it almost felt like an imposition: a piece of impertinence on the part of the calf in question: After all, I was on-site for educational purposes, specifically to show my niece where milk came from and how farms were run. Yes, we wanted to see individual examples of cattle, so to speak, but to satisfy our scientific interest only: we didn't expect (well, I didn't expect, in any case) to be, so to speak, singled out emotionally by any one representative of the bovine race. Worse yet, the fact that the creature was being so trustingly and matter-of-factly "forward" with me (or at least appearing to be so thanks to the wistful gaze of her bulging and soulful peepers), she seemed to be naturally begging the question, Why am I, as the human being in this interspecies encounter, standing on so much ceremony like this? Why don't I just say "Hello" and give her a friendly pat on the head by way of emotional reciprocation?



So, on the way home (after the obligatory purchase of an ice-cream cone for my niece in the Dairy's, alas, now-closed gift shop) I began thinking:



Suppose humankind could start from scratch, without any preconception regarding the appropriate uses to which we might put various of our fellow species (in other words, suppose that "thou and I" COULD conspire with Fate "to grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire," agronomical aspects included).... what role, for just one example, would we be naturally liable to assign to the bovine race, or at any rate to the females thereof?



Well, I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that, lacking any major biases (like that which might be instilled in us from a spartan upbringing wherein "utility" is championed as the only real virtue) -- lacking any such bias and without ever having even heard the word "dairy" before, let alone supped, so to speak, at the lactic trough -- I tell you that when we looked into their soulfully poetic eyes for the first time (set off so comically by their ridiculously prosaic snouts) we would resolve at once to treat them henceforth as role models deserving of our protection, as a special sort of children, even, whose deficit in the smarts department has been more than offset by a surplus of what we might call "heart."



Fair enough, Widow? Is everyone else with me, too, now? Good.



Now maybe it's at least a little clearer why that quote from Omar Khayyam comes into my head when I think about human beings and their actual (as opposed to ideal) relationship with their fellow beasts.



I mean, what newcomer to the cow species would be so heartless as to glance into those heartbreakingly naive eyes of theirs and then shout: "Mable, get the meat cleaver!"



Of course, obviously, someone DID do that long ago and humankind has been following bloody suit ever since, but why should we unquestioningly keep following the practice of some original butcher when our own logic tells us that the butcher in question must have been a heartless madman, i.e., a butcher in the worst sense of the word?



And then there are gorillas. Did I ever tell you about the time at the Franklin Zoo up in Boston when a big honking male gorilla singled me out for a stare contest, me alone, even though I was standing quietly in the back of a large crowd of patrons who themselves were shouting at him and making extravagant hand and facial gestures in the hopes of attracting his somber but seemingly imperturbable attention? I like to think that the look was sadly confidential, as if the gorilla were thereby saying to me, "Do you see what I have to put up with on a daily basis, me, a big strong once-proud gorilla?" But at the time, at least, it felt accusatory, something along the lines of: "YOU out there: Aren't you ashamed of yourself for being here with all the rest of these goggle-eyed onlookers? YOU, at least, seem to recognize -- I can see it in your eyes -- that our two species aren't quite as different as folks like to think, and yet there you stand with all the rest, when a truly moral person with your knowledge of the current situation would rush right home at this very instant to begin composing letters to his various congressmen and women to demand that I and my fellows are set free at once in a suitable environment, and damn the expenses. After all, you guys kidnapped us in the first place: it's down to you to bear the cost of our repatriation in some fitting and appropriately spacious biome."



See, gang? Now is it finally clear why I opened this morning's sermon with that quatrain of that 11th-century Persian poet?



Now then, a couple quick caveats and we're "out of here," to attend (ironically enough) the annual steak dinner hosted by the Men's Prayer Club. (Hey, it's a chronological coincidence. Anyway, I scheduled my sermon weeks before the Men decided on the date of this year's pig-out.)



Caveat One: I don't mean to canonize species across the board, or without appropriate qualifications. There's nothing cute about a rattlesnake, after all (except perhaps in the obviously biased mind of a female rattlesnake watching junior take his very first "wriggle") -- and as for gorillas, we'd do well to remember that they have the reasoning power of a two-year-old with the strength of three or four Charles Atlases (or Buster freakin' Crabbes, if you prefer). I've read more than one tragic story of how a human being has been impulsively pummeled to death by some heretofore "friendly" monkey, even monkeys that the victim had personally raised from their simian childhood. Nor should we be surprised, and/or blame the monkey, any more than we would blame a two-year-old child for throwing a tantrum: After all, that's what two-year-old children DO. In each case, however, we should do what we can to prevent these inevitable episodes from harming either the perpetrator or those around them. In the case of the child, that means, perhaps, holding them in your lap until they calm down, or sending them to their (hopefully shatter-resistant) room. In the case of the powerful but usually docile monkey, that means appreciating their apparent intelligence and playfulness, but not attempting to get overly close to them physically speaking -- and above all, it means being ready with some heavy-duty countermeasures should the beast (as is bound to happen someday, after all) suddenly "lose it" and make with the flailing fists for a few anger-crazed minutes or so.



Caveat Two: I'm not necessarily advocating vegetarianism -- indeed, I'm not advocating anything: I'm just making a few hopefully discussion-inspiring comments about human beings and their relationship to other animal species. Still, these reflections of mine do suggest that I might want to "lay off the beef" for a while for the sake of my own conscience until I've really thought this thing through. (There goes my steak dinner. SIGH!) But what I most want to suggest here is that we should consider these stances on a beast by beast basis, rather than deciding whether or not to be a "vegetarian" in the abstract. On the one hand, we humans have canine teeth, for heaven's sake, so I can't believe we were somehow expected by God or Mother Nature or whomever to abstain entirely on the meat front. On the other hand, we are sentient beings par excellence, and like it or not, we can recognize sentience in other species. Indeed, if you'll remember back to the beginning of this seemingly endless harangue of mine, that was what nearly gave me the heebie jeebies back at Shenville Creamery and Garden Market several years ago, the fact that I was so powerfully impressed by the, so to speak, "in-your-face" sentience of that eyelash-batting calf. I mean, either you listen to your heart or you don't, and if my heart's ever said anything to me, it was talking to me that day at the dairy farm, telling me that the cow before me should by rights die of nothing except old age!



Caveat Three: The foregoing comments are obviously based on cows as a domestic animal. I'm a preacher, not a scientist, so I'm not sure what cows were like before we humans put them under the yoke. Still, presumably even then, they had soulful eyes. (Incidentally, this is neither here nor there, but I get a kick out of imagining cows before domestication. I picture them rushing around with improbable fleetness, ravaging berry trees and hedges in the same insatiable way that deer go after such bounty today. And then I suppose when you surprise them in the woods (where they must walk, much less run, with some difficulty, by the way) they snarl at you and then show you their substantial backside, running away -- with great determination yet inevitably with great clumsiness, too -- through the obstacle course of the surrounding forest. And then those first fleeting original half-whimsical attempts to attract the creatures with kind words and a little hay: "Here, cow-ee, cow-ee: Come on, boy -- or girl, rather!")




So after a rocky and somewhat pedantic start to this morning's sermon, we return to my original citational desiderata, which, after I read it one last time, we will all adjourn to the social hall -- where some of us, perhaps, will still be psychologically able to eat a big steak dinner. (Again, I'm sorry about the timing of this seemingly anti-beef sermon, but it's the Men's Prayer Club's fault: they should have asked me what I was preaching about before they went and scheduled their shindig for immediately after Sunday church!)



So once again, in the aspiring wish of Omar Khayyam (which we've subsequently expanded to include a utopian call for an unbiased appreciation of our fellow creatures, for surely the "Scheme of Things entire" includes all animals, not just us):



Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits - and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!



(You're darn right we would! Humph!)








Editor's note:




"A safe bet," indeed. You know, the webmaster didn't realize it until it was too late, but the introductory quote that he selected today from Omar Khayyam (delightful as it may be in and of itself) is just not sufficiently related to the topic of his musings to serve as the referential centerpiece for which he attempts to use it. I had to giggle to myself, in fact (for I was in the chapel that morning) when His Majesty held forth in this fashion -- you could see he was going adrift, but he couldn't put his finger on the problem. He kept asking the congregation if they understood what he was talking about -- and no wonder: the devil himself couldn't see what he was driving at, talking first about Omar Khayyam and love, and then suddenly segueing so sharply into the unlikely subject of cows as to give his listeners psychological whiplash. Of course, I was tempted to raise my hand and tell him in a hushed voice that his centerpiece quotation was at fault here, that he was, in essence, trying to shove the square peg of his sermon into the round hole of his poorly chosen poetic reference or vice versa -- but that would have only made the congregation more aware than ever that the old boy was making a real hash of it that morning.


Mind you, his own opening sentence should have tipped him off that something was wrong with his rhetorical game plan: "It's a safe bet," says he, in effect, "that Omar Khayyam never thought about the subject upon which I am about to dilate." Well, hello, Brian! If the dude never even thought about the topic you're about to discuss, maybe (just maybe) you should have introduced your sermon with somebody else's more relevant quote!


In case you're wondering why I'm telling you this now, it's so that the young people out there (especially those considering a career in the clergy) can learn from the Herr Webmaster's mistake today and remember to stay on topic. Don't let the fact that you love a given poem (as B-man loves the Rubaiyat, for instance) trick you into forcibly introducing a quote in a sermon where it just plain doesn't belong. I have no doubt that Brian was telling the truth when he said that the quote under consideration reminds him personally of cows or whatever: but the more important question is: would the poem necessarily remind ANYBODY ELSE of cows or whatever? And I've got to tell you, I just don't think it would!