The Kingdom of God is like a Henhouse
By Nathan
Article reprinted with permission from CatholicStand.com.
Rotten eggs explode. I learned the hard way.
It all started when I moved our family out to the country. The house next to my in-laws came up for sale and we pounced. My wife grew up out in Dearing, GA, and my decade of living in Los Angeles gave me a desire to get away from big city life. We both wanted to raise our kids where we had room to breathe. Dearing proper doesn’t even have a stoplight, and we’re 5 miles out of town.
Of course, country living means chickens. The sellers built a little chicken run in the backyard with a tiny roost in the middle. One of my early projects was building a chicken coop big enough for about 20 chickens. I can stand up straight inside it. It’s 2x4s wrapped in chicken wire with a metal roof, but I’m pretty proud of it.
We started with Americana chickens, which lay pretty blue eggs. Every day is like Easter. Thus began my education in animal husbandry.
Beware the Brooder
Sometimes, a hen goes broody. Usually, this only happens if we forget to collect the eggs for a few days. Seeing a bunch of eggs triggers some urge deeply rooted in a chicken’s brain to sit on them and hatch them out. We have one little gray and white hen that we named Jemima after Jemima Puddleduck from Beatrix Potter. If you spend as much time reading children’s books as I do, you’ll know that Jemima was a terrible sitter.
A terrible sitter doesn’t keep the eggs warm, so her eggs die. In our chicken coop, we had four nesting boxes in a 2×2 arrangement. Jemima started to sit on a clutch of eggs in one nesting box, only to sit in another nesting box after going to get something to eat. She just got lost on the way home to her nest.
I didn’t have much hope for that first clutch of eggs, but my wife thought that they might be ok. Why not give them a chance? What could be the harm? Eggs hatch in about 21 days, give or take. Three weeks passed from the time Jemima started sitting. Mary insisted that we give her a little more time.
At about 26 days, a stench filled the backyard. One of the eggs in the clutch had broken. The gray-green goo that oozed out was something out of a horror/comedy movie. So stinky. Finally, my wife admitted that there was little hope for the rest of the eggs. I went out to get the eggs with a flat-bladed shovel to bury them in the woods.
Kaboom!
That’s how I learned that rotten eggs explode. When an egg rots, gases build up pressure inside the shell. When something jostles the egg, like my hand reaching in to pick it up and bumping into it, POP! Rotten egg sprays all over everything, including me. Gross! It’s a hard lesson. After wiping the bigger globs off my hand, I used the shovel and stood a good way back to get the rest of the eggs.
Poor Jemima! She tried two or three more times unsuccessfully before we figured out a solution. I built a little mobile box, called a pullet pen, that we could put her in when she got broody. The idea was that she would sit on the right nest if there was only one possible option. We were right!
I don’t know if chickens can feel happiness, but that’s the only word that I can use to describe Jemima as her chicks scrambled around her. She looked positively content and completely satisfied. When we opened the lid of the pullet pen to look at the chicks when they were little, they would all run to their mother hen and hide under her wings. Little heads would pop out from between the gray and white feathers, looking to see what dangers might lurk outside the safety of their mother’s warm embrace. When the chicks got bigger, they would just about lift Jemima off the ground when they packed under the shadow of her wings.
A couple of years later, a friend gave us a couple of chickens hatched in an incubator. They were pullet-sized, which means they were about halfway between being a baby chick and an adult hen. Their behavior was noticeably different. Instead of all running toward a mother hen when something alarmed them, they all scattered in different directions. They had no mother to run to!
I did a little research and learned that chicks do something called ‘imprinting’ on their mother shortly after they hatch. The image of their mother hen is deeply imprinted in their brains as the source of safety and food. Chicks that hatch in an incubator never imprint on their mother hen. I read some funny stories about chicks imprinting on other animals like goats, dogs, or cats. I’ve seen the way the neighborhood cats eye our chicken coop. They are not a source of safety and protection.
The King of the Roost
On His way into Jerusalem to face His passion, Jesus laments over Jerusalem, saying, “…how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were unwilling!” (Luke 13:34) He who wrote the chicken’s nature understands something essential about the human condition.
“No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him.” (John 1:18) Like those chicks raised in the incubator, the people of Jerusalem did not know God. When faced with the threats and worries of life, they scattered in every direction rather than turning to the safety and protection Jesus wanted to give them. They were like chicks without a mother hen, prey all the creatures in the barnyard.
But the Incarnation changed all of that. Jesus assumed a human nature and took on a human face so that we might look upon His face and know Him. Even today, we can see Him face to face in Eucharistic Adoration and learn to trust the safety offered under His wings.
Like an eager mother hen, Jesus looks upon our world full of eggs that He would like to hatch into eternal life through baptism. But the grace of baptism is only the beginning. He wants to shelter us under the protection of His wings until we are full-fledged Christians capable of bringing others into God’s family, sheltering others as we have been sheltered.
Chicks were not created to stay fluffy and cute and hide under their mother’s wings forever. Neither does Jesus want Catholics to remain infants in the faith for their entire lives. He wants us to “attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ…” (Eph 4:13). Jesus wants us to become like Him. He wants us to become saints.
What He doesn’t want is more rotten eggs.
Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.
