The Sign of Noble Souls
Not long ago I found a tiny immature turtle, surely no bigger than a quarter, struggling on the road. No expert in their ways, I don’t know if it would have made it to the water or not. What a saw was a candidate for squishing by foot, bike or car. I picked it up and walked out of my way to the river and put the turtle in, not even sure if he(she) was actually alive. I watched for a while and it seemed to get more animated and then eventually swam slowly away. Feeling flush with virtue, I thought of Androcles and the Lion. Remember the story? Originally it was from Aesop and later retold by George Bernard Shaw in play form.
Androcles was a slave who escaped into the forest. While on the run, he came across a lion in obvious pain lying on the ground moaning and groaning. Since the lion didn’t seem to want to attack him or cause any trouble, the slave went over to him and found a thorn deep in one paw that the big cat couldn’t pull out. Androcles removed the offending thorn and the lion showed his appreciation by licking his face and hands like any one of our pet dogs might do.
Each went his own way and not too long after that both were captured separately and brought to the arena. Androcles was going to be thrown to the lion who hadn’t been fed for three days, with the aim of making him hungry and ferocious and aggressive and putting on a good show for the spectators. Well don’t you know when the lion was let out into the ring he saw it was his former benefactor and he jumped up on him and licked him again and wrestled with him and they played together which was of course disappointing to fans expecting a bloodbath. But this caught the attention of the Emperor, who called for Androcles to tell him the story. When he heard it he granted the slave his freedom and commanded that the lion be released back into the forest.
Aesop, as he was wont to do, ended the story with a moral, which in this case was –Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve walked in the riverfront park and I have had the childlike fanciful thought that maybe my turtle, all grown up, would be there at the water’s edge and recognize me. His own Androcles! I had a pet turtle when I was very young and it died, shell-down, in five days. Maybe I was looking for some karmic absolution.
It seems counter intuitive that animals could actually show gratitude or remember a human benefactor, certainly more so with reptiles. Yet, in his book The Bonobo and the Atheist, Frans De Waal cites accounts of expressions of same, between apes and also between apes and humans. The larger point of the volume is how morality is possible without religion and, by way of proof, even shows up in other animals, like our nearest cousins the bonobos (formerly called pigmy chimps), for example.
Because of this, he writes “Gratitude helps us render another person his due. Since it keeps favors flowing, it is essential for a society based on reciprocity. It was so highly regarded by Thomas Aquinas that he called it a secondary virtue, tied to the primary one of Justice. Gratitude creates a warm feeling about received benefits, which prompts us to repay them. Why else would we do so? Out of duty? It is so much easier if our memory predisposes us kindly toward a benefactor. We’d barely feel it as a repayment. This is why Robert Trivers, the architect of ‘reciprocal altruism theory’, proposed gratitude as a critical ingredient.”
So, with our Inquiry Into A Gratitude-Inspired Life, we are working on a “critical ingredient” in our common life together, an inquiry that can be as sophisticated as science and as simple as the imagination of a child. As Br Curtis Almquist said, “If you’re not now in touch with the mysterious majesty of life, look again. It’s just as mysterious as you thought it was as a child.”
