In Praise of Sloth

It’s Saturday and I don’t have to get up and out straight away, so it’s tea in bed and morning radio. Later I’ll be doing the prep for tomorrow’s services, plus finishing writing the training notes for the ministry team training session early next week, plus going up the town to the market and having the five conversations up the street and the six conversations down the street that make living here so delightful. And there’s a concert in church tonight, which includes a Schubert Mass, so that’ll be fab. But this is now Day 13 on duty, and I do rather look forward to a couple of days off at the end of next week. We knew that when I decided to take time off in blocks that that would be good, because we could use the time off better, but it would lead to long working spells. I find this is becoming more difficult to sustain as I get older, but I still prefer it to just 24 hours every week (the English clergy only take one day a week), which is just not enough for me to unwind and really recharge my batteries.

“The three toed sloth is not well-informed about the world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe (1926) gave sloth’s senses of taste, touch sight and hearing a rate of 2, and its sense of smell a rate of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three toed sloth in the wild, two or three nudges should be sufficient to awaken it; it will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound. Beebe reported that firing guns next to sleeping or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the sloth’s slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated. They are said to be able to sniff and avoid decayed branches, but Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging to decayed branches “often”.

How does it survive, you might ask.

Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it out of harm’s way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles and anacondas. A sloth’s hairs shelter an algae that is brown during the dry season and green during the wet season, so the animal blends in with the surrounding moss and foliage and looks like a nest of white ants or squirrels, or like nothing at all but part of a tree.

The three toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. “A good natured smile is forever on its lips” reported Tirler (1966). I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but ….. looking up at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing.”

Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2002)

So, sorry, but I don’t understand. This animal has given its name to a DEADLY SIN? How did that happen? Tom Hodgkinson (“How to be Idle” and “How to be Free”) blames it on those damn pesky hard-working guilt-ridden nose-to-the-grindstone make-an-effort no-pain-no-gain you-get-out-what-you-put-in devil-makes- work- for-idle-hands puritan protestant EVANGELICALS that have done this! The Sloth is not a Deadly Sin, but a Role Model.