According to the Times, the modern shepherd has been reduced to an underpaid and badly treated immigrant worker. What happened to the inveterate sheepherder that I remember, walking alone on a mountainside, protecting the animals that nurtured us, guiding all through nature’s capricious forces? It turns out he or she had a boss. Unlike farmers, shepherds of the modern era have always been paid laborers, almost always watching someone else’s sheep. Today’s shepherds endure extended periods of loneliness, little to eat, no place to use the bathroom, harsh winds and extreme temperature shifts.

Growing up, Shepherds occupied a special place in my imagination. Pan, the Greek God of shepherds, lute in hand, pranced through my dreams of eternal childhood. Heidi and her shepherd friend, Peter, cured a city cousin’s paralysis by exposing her to the mountain air. Shepherds guided me and all my friends through many a childhood bedtime story. As adults, especially when things were tough, like now, we have wistfully imagined life on a high open plain at one with our sheep and at peace with nature’s dominion over our souls.

Yet, I kept hearing those shepherds out in the western United States. I was reminded of the Book of Amos. Amos, a sheepherder deeply immersed in a pastoral life, lived far from the demands of an emergent Israel. He is called upon by God to come to Israel and to see the chosen people through his unspoiled eyes. Instead of seeing the increasing accumulation of material culture, he saw a nation that was corrupting itself with greed, materialism, and disregard for others. Then he spoke, uttering the prophetic words of one who has tended to the land and knew well the imperative of nature’s limits and constraints.

Levi-Strauss once said that we sometimes find in the eyes of someone different a reflection of our own selves. Maybe these exploited modern shepherds are spreading their own form of prophesy. Their story is telling us something about who we are. Are the conditions of the sheepherders’ lives an enactment of how we treat food? We no longer know the animal that feeds or clothes us and therefore we no longer respect the laborer who cares for that animal. The modern shepherd in the American west is our symbolic prophet calling us out to look at what we have done to ourselves. The mistreatment of the shepherd reflects that which we have done to our souls when we no longer respect the holiness of food.