“The universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.”*

When we understand ourselves to be part of the natural order, rather than above or apart from it, we can learn from all fauna and flora, including sheep.

There’s Shari Lewis’s Lamb Chop and Nick Park’s Shaun the Sheep, but I can’t think of many heroic sheep.  Even in the sheep world, it’s the shepherds and sheepdogs who star.

John Ortberg suggests sheep are about vulnerability rather than invulnerability.  And vulnerability, as Brené Brown reminds us, is more powerful than invulnerability.  Jesus of Nazerath once told his disciples he was sending them like sheep among wolves.

We’d prefer to be wolves, really, or hawks, lions, or rhinos maybe.  Antoine de Saint-Exupery has his Little Prince asking the pilot/narrator to draw a sheep.  It’s a way for the adult to enter into the world of the little prince.  Everyone’s perception is different- perhaps sheep help us to see how this is so, being more open to one another’s worlds.

(*Evolutionary theorist Thomas Berry, quoted in Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)