Chris Upton: A flock to the order of things
Mar 12 2010 By Chris Upton
I have never knowingly identified myself with sheep. Indeed, the only time I give the woolly creatures any attention at all is when I’m explaining the medieval English economy to my students.
In those days – the golden age of sheep – they outnumbered the human beings, and occupied large tracts of the Cotswolds, the Welsh Marshes and the Yorkshire Dales. Without its six million sheep, and the wool and the cloth they produced, England was a poor country indeed. It’s no wonder that the Lord Chancellor still sits on a sack of them.
Personally speaking, though, our paths rarely cross. None graze in Balsall Heath and very few of them attend my lectures.
Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that on the few occasions I go to church – weddings, funerals and carol services – sheep are all over the place. If we chased them off, we would remove many of our best-known hymns and much of our choral music. When we go astray in the Messiah, it is like sheep, not like llamas. And “all on an April evening” it is not a herd of wildebeest that go past, but “a sheep with her little lambs”. And every “Agnus Dei” would be expunged from the record.
They turned up constantly – much to my surprise – during my mother’s funeral service last week. I had chosen a section of John Rutter’s Requiem as the music and a whole flock of them were in that. Then, perhaps picking up on my lead, the minister chose the 23rd Psalm for his reading. By this time I was a sheep and the Lord was my shepherd.
And then, as if the chapel was not already full of the things, he moved on to the parable of lost sheep, and another 99 came in.
Coming from engineering and not shepherding stock, I struggled to identify with this. The metaphor felt rather remote. It was only when he mentioned the wolves that my attention returned. It’s probably unwise for a reverend in a Wolverhampton chapel to expect his flock – there it goes again – to side with the sheep and not the wolves.
But then the service ended and we all flocked out, the minister at our back.
* Dr Chris Upton is grazing safely at Newman University College in Birmingham.
