The Shepherd, by Frederick Buechner

 The Shepherd

from A Christmas Triptych, by Frederick Buechner

“Night was coming on, and it was cold,” the shepherd said, “and I was terribly hungry. I had finished all the bread I had in my sack, and my gut still ached for more. Then I noticed my friend, a shepherd like me, about to throw away a crust he didn’t want. So I said, ‘Throw the crust to me, friend!’ and he did throw it to me, but it landed between us in the mud where the sheep had mucked it up. But I grabbed it anyway and stuffed it, mud and all, into my mouth. And as I was eating it, I suddenly saw – myself. It was as if I was not only a man eating bread but a man watching a man eating bread. And I thought, ‘This is who I am.  I am a man who eats muddy bread.’ And I thought, “The bread is very good.’ And I thought, ‘Ah, and the mud is very good, too.’ So I opened my muddy man’s mouth full of bread and I yelled to my friends, ‘By God, it’s good, brothers!’ And they thought I was a terrible fool, but they saw what I meant. We saw everything that night. Everything. Everything!

“Can I make you understand, I wonder? Have you ever had this happen to you? You have been working hard all day. You’re dog-tired, bone-tired. So you call it quits for a while. You slump down under a tree or against a rock or something and just sit there in a daze for half an hour or a million years, I don’t know, and all this time your eyes are wide open looking straight ahead someplace but they’re so tired and glassy they don’t see a thing. Nothing. You could be dead for all you notice. Then, little by little, you begin to come to, then your eyes begin to come to, and all of a sudden you find out you’ve been looking at something the whole time except it’s only now you really see it – one of the ewe lambs maybe, with its foot caught under a rock, or the moon scorching a hole through the clouds. It was there all the time, and you were looking at it all the time, but you didn’t see it till just now.

"That’s how it was this night, anyway. Like finally coming to – not things coming out of nowhere that had never been there before, but things just coming into focus that have been there always. And such things! The air wasn’t just emptiness anymore. It was alive. Brightness everywhere, dipping and wheeling like a flock of birds. And what you always thought was silence stopped being silent and turned into the beating of wings, thousands and thousands of them. Only not just wings, as you came to more, but voices –high, wild, like trumpets. The words I could never remember later, but something like what I’d yelled with my month full of bread. ‘By God, it’s good, brothers! The crust. The mud. Everything. Everything!’

“Oh well. If you think we were out of our minds, you are right, of course. And do you know, it was just like being out of jail. I can see us still. The squint-eyed one who always complained of sore feet. The little sawed-off one who could outswear a Roman. The young one who blushed like a girl. We all tore off across that muddy field like drunks at a fair, and drunk we were, crazy drunk splashing through a sea of wings and moonlight and the silvery wool of the sheep. Was it night? Was it day! Did our feet touch the ground?

“‘Shh, shh, you’ll wake up my guests,’ said the Innkeeper we met coming in the other direction, with his arms full of wood. And when we got to the shed out back, one of the foreigners who were there held a finger to his lips.

“At the eye of the storm, you know, there’s no wind – nothing moves – nothing breathes – even silence keeps silent. So hush now. There he is. You see him? You see him?

“By Almighty God, brothers. Open your eyes. Listen.”

A cookie for one

“Making a single-serving chocolate chip cookie is the perfect outlet for a stress-filled day.” So read the caption under a picture of a pair of hands mixing cookie dough in a hand-sized bowl.

As the holiday season—propelled in part by sweets—rushes in upon us I cannot imagine a sillier, lonelier enterprise than baking one cookie at a time. At the same time, doing just that may represent the sorry excesses of our American individualism and divisions.

I started baking chocolate chip cookies several years ago in a quest for the secret to my mother’s recipe for them. Her chocolate chips were like no others. She baked an untold number of them for decades prior to her death at nearly 96 in 2015.

Mom could have never imagined baking to satisfy her appetite alone. She baked for family and friends. Her cookie jar was never empty, and was usually filled with chocolate chips. In her later years—much of her family scattered—she drove around our community on Saturday afternoons to give away cookies, breads, and rolls that had been isolated raw ingredients earlier that day.

I believe my cookies come pretty close to tasting like hers, though I am not sure exactly why. It’s taken some experimentation, and therefore some investment of time to approximate her secret. My experience has convinced me that making a single-serving chocolate chip cookie is an extravagant enterprise destined to lead to lonely consumption.

The article with that picture reported that it takes half-an-hour to bake one cookie. In around three hours I can mix, shape, bake, stow and clean up after the creation of 48 chocolate chip cookies. Do the math: my way is eight times more efficient than the one-at-a-time way. My mother, who no doubt made her cookies much faster than I can, would not have survived had she been so inefficient.

Advocates of small-batch baking (as they call it) may argue that not everyone can carve out a three-hour block of time to bake. I counter with, you make time to do what you want, don’t you? If you baked four dozen cookies in a single evening and preserved them (freezing works), you could eat one a day for a month and half without investing another minute or making another mess.

But of course, you’d have to eat each cookie all by yourself. You would not dare invite a neighbor in to watch you eat your cookie, would you?

This, then, is my real concern: loneliness; isolation; individualism. As in, I’ll do it myself for myself. Other people just get out of my way and my life.

That sounds extreme. But it is exactly the opposite of how my mother lived her life. Though she could be an independent sort, her overriding concern was always the comfort and good of others, particularly of her family.

Being so focused on yourself that you bake a cookie that simple good manners dictate you must eat by yourself sounds like much of what endangers our nation and world today.

In 2020, the BBC conducted what it called “The Loneliness Experiment.” It surveyed over 46,000 people of all ages living in 237 countries regarding their experiences of loneliness. Among its findings was this: “people in individualistic (vs. collectivist) countries reported more loneliness.”

In the name of individual and private freedom, many of us resist masking requests and vaccination requirements, laws that extend liberty to people not like us, to using public policy to share some wealth with poor Americans, and more. We think we can take care of ourselves without caring about people we do not happen to know. As long as I am okay—but even if I am not—I will not do what anyone else tells me to do, even to preserve the common good or to protect my neighbor. Because I am my own person, responsible only for my own self.

“America First”—when it means “America only” or “America in isolation”—is the macro-political equivalent of baking one cookie at a time and eating it alone. It seems so right…until we can’t get our hands on the things we need to bake just one last cookie because someone else controls our access to them.

How to overcome loneliness in our uber-individualistic and isolationist land? Here’s a start: bake a real batch of chocolate chip cookies…2, 4, 6 dozen. Then, share them. Give them away, or enjoy them and a cup of tea or glass of milk with someone else. The baking and the sharing will both do wonders for you. They will do wonders for others as well, and could be your greatest contribution to the flourishing of us all.