Good thing the Pope isn't trying to bless any of MY livestock -- muddy pawmarks and lots of shed hair on nice clean vestments would be the result.
Heavily sedated lambs. Where’s the mint jelly?????
The lambs are toooooo cute. Somebody said they’re fed lots of food and then are sort of sleepy when they’re brought out (although you will notice the discreet silk ribbons tying them down). Other people have suggested Xanax.
But lambs really are very cute and are incredibly docile and sweet. I had never known any lambs or sheep personally, so to speak, until I did the Camino de Santiago. Spain is full of sheep, and they are incredibly sweet and sympathetic and trusting animals.
One of the Spanish girls I walked with for a couple of days told me that her grandfather had been a shepherd, and he named all of his sheep and then literally knew them all by name. They all looked the same to me. But he could identify them and call them out. He would sleep in front of the gate to the holding pens the shepherds put them in when they moved them to different pastures.
I never really understood why there was so much “sheep imagery” in the Gospels until I got to know sheep a little better.
I remember one stretch through the plains of Castilla, outside of Burgos, where I saw a strange shape about a mile away that I couldn’t identify. I thought it was a person who kept coming out onto the Camino to look for somebody else. When I got closer, I realized that it was a very tall, recently shorn sheep. But it had obviously been attacked by dogs, one of its legs was torn and it was lame, and it had gotten separated from its herd and its shepherd.
Because the pilgrims generally carried staffs, the sheep thought we might be its shepherd, whom it trusted and who was clearly the person the sheep wnated to see at that moment. It would raise its head when we came into view, but as soon as we got close enough (about a half kilometer) for it to identify our gait and size, it would drop its head and go back into the brush at the side of the Camino. It was really one of the most tragic things I have ever seen, but it really made me understand the sheep imagery in the Gospels.