Reflection #27 (Only 1049 to go!): Short Story Made Long

Preface: This is the story of why Saint Ignatius' mascot is the wolf.
Parts 1 and 2 have absolutely nothing to do with mascots or wolves.

Part 1: My "bucket list"...sort of.
    While I have always loved teaching, there were things that I wished that I’d have time for...but didn't; e.g., playing the trombone, practicing tap dancing, reading all the "classics", and so on. I've often mused about the possibility that there may be people who might have been the world's best at some activity, if they had been exposed to it. Perhaps the world's greatest baseball player might have been born in the outback of Australia, but never had the chance to play...whatever.
    Might I have had some latent talent that would surface if I had the time to pursue it? It turns out, NO!
Of all of the grand schemes and aspirations that I envisioned, the only one that I stayed with was scroll sawing; i.e., cutting images of things or words out of thin pieces of wood to make objet d’art .    Having seen what some people are capable of, I'm pretty sure that I'm not only NOT the world's greatest scroll-sawer. I'm pretty sure that I'm not even in the top 50%, but I do love it. On some level, I think that I have the soul of an artist. (Disclaimer: Having the “soul of an artist” is not the same as having the “talent of an artist“.)
Part 2: Ornaments
    When I practiced my new-found hobby to make some Christmas ornaments for members of the Development Staff a few years ago, John Chandler asked me if I would make 100 for a subset (math-speak) of the Ignatius community. So each of the last 5 years, I’ve made Christmas ornaments for the school. This year's ornament is of a wolf gazing up at the star that announced Jesus' birth. Along with the ornament, I’ve included an explanation of the significance of the "wolf" to Ignatius.

Part 3: Finally...the answer to the Ignatius Wolf question
    On the crest of the Jesuits, there is the image of two wolves standing on either side of a kettle. The name "Loyola", as in Saint Ignatius of Loyola, is derived from a contraction of the Spanish words for "wolf" and "pot": "lobo y olla". The official explanation for their presence is that wolf stands for "nobility" and pot represents "generosity".
    Very early in my career, I heard that there is a "story behind the story". Why those symbols? Ignatius was raised in the Basque region of north-eastern Spain, which was primarily a sheep-raising area. The story goes that when wolves would come around and threaten the sheep, the shepherds would boil the innards of dead sheep. Since the smell of boiling sheep would be stronger and more alluring than the live sheep, it drew the wolves away from the flock. Somehow, that doesn’t make the wolves seem all that noble, but who am I to judge.
    There is also a version that says when the wolves went to the kettle, the shepherds would “smite” them with clubs. Personally, I doubt that version...but, hey, that’s me.