"Why do you scramble for the most prestigious seats like chickens after a grub?" -- from The Justus Scrolls

Daisy is not fond of chickens. I suppose it has something to do with the rooster chasing her around the yard, pecking at her bottom. The dog has a good set of fangs, but they do not seem to frighten the rooster. At one of our more profound conversations she enlightened me as to how humans are often like chickens.

She observed that at the core of the desire for prestige is a misguided and exaggerated sense of amour proper.* Such thoughts, feelings; such pathological urges and impulses are enormously counter-productive and worse, self-destructive.

"Often," she opined in the sophisticated cadence of Maltese canine prose, "these impulses lead one to precisely the opposing place than one thought they would take him. Thus, instead of placing one at the apex of position, they cause one to compare himself with another; the 'other' usually winning out. Hence, he incurs the pain of self-imposed inferiority."

Wise puppy.

She thought that a group of chickens chasing after a grub to be an apt metaphor.

To be sure, I have seen it myself. While growing up, I lived next door to a family that raised chickens. I discovered that if one purposes to spend time in observance of a pen of chickens, one must first-off realize that it isn't going to be pretty.

A chicken pen is not a particularly hospitable place. Once I was charged with the formidable task of cleaning out Sister Hamby's chicken coop. Sister Hamby was no nun. She was, in a word, a delightful elderly lady. Well, perhaps I am trying to be kind. A more apt description is one who gave the appearance of a white-haired old crone, a hag of a woman whose laugh would drown out the roar of a lion and who smoked like a chimney. She was short, white hair, wore thick glasses, and I couldn't help but wonder how often she bathed. Still, I liked her because she baked me cookies.

As I addressed Sister Hamby's chicken coop, I allowed the door to swing open, creaking on its rusting hinges. There, inside, racked up against the wall, stood a chicken roost.

It was daytime, morning actually, so the chickens were out in the yard, chasing grubs, or bugs, or each other. Who knows the complex priorities caroming off the walls inside chicken skulls? Often, they peck at each other's head, leaving the unfortunate with a head which produces a bird more resembling a turkey buzzard, than a chicken. And there, beneath the chicken roost, was a four-foot deep pile of chicken manure. The odor smelled a mixture of chicken feathers, little white crawly things, an odd white, gray and brown admixture of chicken bowel movements, and . . . ammonia.

If you know anything at all about a four-foot-high pile of chicken manure, the moment I mention the smell of ammonia, you know I am telling the truth.

Also, if you are a professional chicken pooper-scooper, you know you need the right tools for the job. The tool of choice here was a long-handled garden "fork." An instrument about four feet long with pointed v-shaped tines on the working end, that with a little force, could tear into the earth seeking to cultivate and dismember huge clods of clay. Only in my case here, it was not clay, but chicken excrement, moist with said ammonia.

I started to work. Before long I was sweating. The smell of ammonia grew stronger and stronger. So strong, in fact, that it became hard to breathe; its molecules mixing with the molecules of my sweat, thus distilling itself through my eyebrows and causing my eyes to sting with I guessed might be sulphuric acid.

The poop clung like honey to the tines of the garden fork, thus making it easier to carry it from the coop itself, to the waiting wheelbarrow. Only it wasn't honey. It was well digested, chicken feed, assorted bugs, worms, and fat, yellow grubs. You know, the kind that looks like an obese caterpillar, brown head, maybe a third of an inch thick and an inch or so, long. Grubby little things! Chickens will kill for them. One chicken grabs a grub, all of the other chickens converge upon it, until the hapless grub is torn to pieces by a wild, frenzied mob of clucking feathers and beaks.

We upright humans, who also convey ourselves about on two scrawny legs, (in some cases, not unlike those of chickens) can be grub-chasers, too. We digest ours in the entrails of our pride and our sense of self-importance. Our grubs are influence, power, position, control, money and things -- to consume in mindless efforts to slake our greed. Inevitably, our abandon to consumption produces an inordinate stench, not too dissimilar from ammonia, which, mixed with the sweat of expended energy, does far more damage than sulphuric acid; and the pile left on the floor beneath the roost is our character, our spirit, the very best of our souls.

I guess it labors the obvious to say that the marketplace and the media has shaped our culture -- not to speak of the legal and psychiatric professions. Glitz, glitter and glamour are prized. We love the TV commercials that tell us how much we "deserve" the products being hawked.

Humility -- true humility, as opposed to feigned -- is seen as weakness.

As for the 'servant of God,' (a term we often wear as a pretentious title), one might prefer be perceived as weak, than perceived as one chasing after a grub with the rest of the chickens. I remember attending a ministerial gathering how we often bragged about the number of baptisms we had that month. The one with the most got the most approbation.

Sick!

But true humility is not weakness. It bears the regal stamp of strength too great for the imagination -- especially the imaginations of chickens.

I wonder if God has ever created a chicken, who, instead of grub-chasing, quietly and humbly clucking, found its way to the nest, and did something truly productive?

Such a chicken might change Daisy's perspective.

-- PDM