Bees and Goats

He is risen! Alleluia! Ave Maria! Jesus has risen from the grave and much of the world is quarantined at home. A perplexing time, to say the least. For spiritual sustenance I have turned to Fr. Kyle Doustou at the Parish of the Resurrection of the Lord in Old Town, Maine. Fr. Kyle was in Portland for three years, so I am grateful to rejoin his flock from a distance. His homily on Holy Thursday was, believe it or not, at least in part, about bees, a subject which had taken on a great significance for me that very day.

During this time of isolation, I am homeschooling my four granddaughters using my Mary's School template. At the same time, they are following along with their public school classes online. Let me just say that the autism spectrum features prominently in my family throughout all living generations; diagnosed in one case, not in others. One of my granddaughters is very resistant to me---as grandmother, as caregiver, as teacher. I am not Mommy. I am not Daddy. I am not her public school teacher. I am not her regular routine. But I must be doing something right for her to trust me enough to trot out all of her bad behavior with me. I long for some respect, but at least she's not afraid of me.

Thursday is the day we do science. One week before Holy Thursday, my granddaughter worked on compiling a list of animal helpers. I asked her to choose one to discuss in more depth. She chose bees. Now I have taught a one-room, alternative school since 1993. Before that I home schooled. I built up a library of thousands of books at all levels. These books and most of my teaching resources are at Mary's House in Springfield, Maine and on Mary's Hill in Lowell, Maine. I have gathered some materials since being in Portland, from the Portland Public Library free shelf and from thrift stores. I know that I have several books about honeybees in Springfield and stacks of homesteading magazines in Lowell. But I can't get there right now (I use public transportation), so I am working with the girls to inspire them to think creatively and try to discover less obvious means to obtain information with the resources we have. Yes, I know she could just Google it, but I am trying to de-emphasize the internet as everything they do outside of Mary's School is online. Besides, it is good for their brains to think creatively.

Needless to say, this approach was met in one granddaughter with lots of eye-rolling and fussing. Her work for that Thursday featured a big heart with the words "blah, blah, blah" inscribed.

Fast forward to Holy Thursday, and again bees were on the agenda. I searched for a book on homesteading that I knew I had, but could not find. While I was out of the room, chaos reigned. My granddaughter entrusted with writing about bees, read snippets here and there about bees, but chose to distract herself and others until she needed time out to calm down. Finally, after listening to her rant and rave about the lack of appropriate information, I asked her to write down questions she had about bees that she would like to have answered. Ultimately, she wrote two questions, both of which revealed to me that the essential problem was not a lack of information, but a learning issue. All right, at least that was a place to start.

By seven that evening, when the Mass of Holy Thursday was beginning to stream from Old Town, I was in tremendous need of some peace. The Triduum was underway and the tears flowed down my cheeks. For the past several years I have played the flute and sung with the Polish/English choir from St. Louis Church as part of the Triduum at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland. My heart was broken and I missed the Eucharist so much. When the Gloria started and bells were ringing in my bedroom from my phone, three of my four granddaughters ran into my room and joined me. After the day we'd had, that was a little surprising! Then, it got even more surprising. Even though Mass was emanating from a cell phone with a tiny picture, the girls became engrossed in the Mass, sitting, standing and kneeling with me as we went along. Then came the homily.

Fr. Kyle started talking about bees. We all looked at one of my granddaughters, who listened intently. When Fr. Kyle compared the sacrificial life of a Christian to that of a worker bee fanning nectar into honey by tireless movement of its wings, she said quietly, "I did not know that." After the homily, we moved into the room we use for school so we could have more room to kneel. The girls stayed with the Mass till the end and the next day, my granddaughter, who always complains when I bring all four granddaughters to Mass, said that it was "really fun!"

Fr. Kyle said that the real milk and honey flowing for the children of Israel was the Eucharist. Since that night, as I read Scripture, all I can see are bees and honey referenced everywhere. And the funny part is that my maiden name is Beebe. My ancestors were beekeepers.

Another aspect of the Holy Thursday Mass that always strikes me is the reading from Exodus about Passover. It says that the lamb without blemish for the Passover meal and whose blood must be put on the door posts, may be taken from the sheep or the goats. As a goat farmer, I am really struck by that. As much as everyone always quotes Matthew 25 where Jesus separates the sheep from the goats in the Last Judgment, the Scriptures are really full of references to goats as a type of Jesus. The scapegoat that carried the Israelites' sins into the wilderness was a type of Jesus. (A type is a foreshadowing, you might say.) The lamb whose blood on the door posts saved the firstborn children of Israel from the angel of death could have been from a lamb or a kid (baby goat). John the Baptist just as well could have referred to Jesus, the Lamb of God, as the Kid of God. It sounds like a joke now, because for centuries we have seen lamb imagery for Jesus and Christians and goat imagery for the devil. The latter comes predominantly from artwork associated with the erroneous accusation that the Knights Templar worshiped the head of an idol. The Templars were suppressed and their leaders burned at the stake for this false charge. Some researchers now believe that the secret they refused to reveal was that they had been entrusted with the safekeeping of the Shroud of Turin, the original burial cloth of Jesus, which, when folded in eight for storage, reveals the head of Jesus. Thus, the head they were worshiping was most likely the image of Jesus on the cloth. Yet through time, a myth arose about a goat-headed figure with supposed demonic features. I have studied the image and am amused by the fact that most of the supposedly grotesque features can be traced to biblical typology of Jesus. I will return to this subject with references, citations and bibliography in hand, at a later date. For now, suffice it to say that while goats are more capricious than sheep (capricious comes from the same root at caprine---having to do with goats,) they are also lovable and even admirable in many ways. The separation of the sheep from the goats is certainly because of the docility of sheep versus the relative independence of goats. The nature of goats is a subject I cover at length in my phonics book Learning to Read with Goats. More about goats to come.

Happy Easter, even in the midst of a pandemic. Divine Child Jesus, bless and protect us. Our Lady of Good Remedy and St. Joseph the Provider, pray for us. St. Nicholas, St. Jude, and all holy angels, saints and martyrs, pray for us. I used to invoke these prayers for the Our Lady and St. Nicholas Project. Now I know I am praying about a great deal more.