Once upon a time there was a simpleton who in his innocence loved Christ. So he
became a shepherd and loved his job. But he had another secret love. He also loved
chess because the chessboard always reminded him that Christ was also a carpenter.
Unfortunately, these two loves did not mix well. He took the sheep to the
mountains, but there he would start playing chess against himself and forget all about
the sheep. The sheep would wander away and get lost forever. Some were even eaten by wolves.
This made the owners mad and they stopped trusting their sheep with him. Thus they
took away half of Christ inside him.
After losing the only job he loved, he just sat in his hut the whole day, watching
sheep from a distance, playing chess, and talking to Christ. Sometimes when he became
tired of these three things he cried because he felt very lonely.
As chess was now the only thing that reminded him of Christ, he decided to become very good at it.
But no chess-master in the village would teach him good moves because they all were in
the payrolls of the sheep-owners, and the sheep-owners were all hell-bent in punishing
him for not looking after their sheep. So he decided to learn from the sheep things that
man would not teach him, make sheep's rules his rules, and play chess as no man had ever played
before. And very strange rules they were indeed.
As he played chess, he would look at the sheep roaming in the mountains. Whenever
the sheep went up the mountains, he would move up on the chess-board, whenever they
moved down, he too would move down. When he saw the sheep moving along the left bank
of the river, he too moved left on the chessboard, and when they moved on the right bank,
he too went right. Whenever he couldn't see the sheep because they were on the other
side of the mountain or hidden in fog, he moved diagonally on the chessboard. He called
them Christ's Moves because he was sure this is the way Christ would have taught him chess.
And with those simple rules learned from Christ, he became a very great chess-player.
Not even the best chess-masters in the village could defeat him.
Everybody was surprised. Nobody could understand how he became so good without a guide.
But nobody liked it either. Everybody became so jealous of him that they decided to
get rid of him by hook or crook.
Soon they found a way to get rid of him and take away the other half of Christ inside him.
One day the grand chess master of the village came to the simpleton with good tidings. The
king had offered a huge reward and his daughter in marriage to anyone who would defeat
him in chess.
Actually they were evil tidings because the king was a very evil king and a very poor chess
player. It was child's play to defeat the king. But instead of getting a reward, the winner
was put to death immediately. That was the kings way of satisfying his lust for innocent blood.
Every chess player in the kingdom knew this secret except the simpleton because he was Christ's
man and so he heard or saw no evil. He readily fell into the trap.
He started towards the king's capital, singing, and dancing, and telling everybody on the
way that he was going to defeat the king in chess and marry his daughter. On hearing this,
people would hide their faces to muffle their screams, bow to him in deep reverence, and invited
him to dine with them because they knew that this was the poor guy's Last Supper for he was heading
towards betrayal and death. But this unexpected reverence and kindness only increased his confidence
and fuelled his desire to defeat the king because he was the only guy in the kingdom who was unaware
of his fate.
When he reached the capital, he was shocked to see that there were no animals, no sheep,
no cattle, no trees, no fresh air in the city - just smoke and smog, tall buildings, and
the king's palace looming in the distance. Panic gripped him. How would he play without the
sheep? How would he know in which direction to move?
Then he saw a herd of very ugly creatures tumbling out of the king's palace. They were
very big and noisy and made of iron but they did run like sheep. Were they some
kind of sheep he had never seen before?
He asked bystanders if those ugly creatures were sheep, and if so, why didn't they look
like Christ's sheep. The sophisticated city-folks laughed at him. They saw at once that
he was a village fool who knew nothing about science and civilization. And so they answered him
in his primitive tongue.
Yes, they are sheep all right. But they are not Christ's Sheep. They are the King's
Sheep. They are called battle-tanks.
That eased the shepherd's mind and gave him his self-confidence back. He had his
sheep for his moves.
The king was very pleased that some fool had at last fallen in his trap, and ordered the
game to start immediately. He was so thirsty for blood that he wanted to lose very fast.
And the game started with great fanfare - music and dance, and a feast with the king and queen.
Then everybody waited for the shepherd to make his moves.
The shepherd's moves were the same old Christ's Moves that had always brought him victory.
When he saw the battle-tanks going into the king's palace, he moved up on the chessboard,
and when he saw them coming out of the palace, he moved down. And as the
tanks turned left from the gate, he turned left on the board, and as they turned
right, he turned right. And when the battle-tanks crossed a bridge, he moved diagonally.
The game lasted for months, but to everybody's surprise, the shepherd lost in the end
even though the king had played as poorly as he possibly could. Even the king could not
believe that he had won against the best chess player in his kingdom, and that too
after doing everything in his power to lose. Till now he had never won in chess - even
against his own children whom he tried his best to impress. His own children made fun
of him. That his why he wanted to wipe out any chess player that was better than him.
But now he had proved his worth against the best. So it was the happiest
day in his life, and he wanted to share his happiness with the man he had defeated.
Instead of killing the shepherd, the king gave him a huge reward, and told him how lucky
he was that he lost - otherwise he would have died. He thought that this would make the
shepherd very happy. It had the opposite effect.
The simpleton couldn't believe his eyes or ears. He couldn't believe that he lost and
he couldn't believe what the king said. Everything began to fall in place. Now he
understood why even strangers invited him for supper. He felt betrayed - first by the
chess master and then by the king and his Black Sheep. And the shock of defeat and betrayal
was far more than any joy of getting a few pieces of gold.
As he walked towards the gate, he had only one question in mind: How could he have lost
to such a worthless player as the king? He went over all his moves a thousand times over
to see where he could have gone wrong. But there was nothing wrong with his moves. They
were all Christ's Moves. Then, as he reached the gate of the palace he noticed a
strange coincidence. If all his moves had been the opposite of what they were, he
would have won straight away. At first it didn't make sense. But then he understood why -
the King's Sheep were not Christ's Sheep. They were the Devil's Black Sheep who had turned all
rules of the game upside down.
He started screaming and hitting his head against the gate in despair. He was defeated by
his own innocence.
"How could have I done that, how could have I done that - trust the grand chess master and then
follow the Devil's Sheep? I should have known that the Devil's Sheep don't follow
Christ's rules. When the Devil's Sheep moved up, I should have moved down, and when they
turned left I should have turned right. And I should have turned diagonally only after
they all fell in the river and drowned. Then I would have won - remained the greatest
chess player in the kingdom."
And wailing in despair, he hit his head against the gate so hard that he died instantly.
The gold coins fell to the ground and were pocketed by the guards even before his body
slumped. Then they threw him into the ditch because a proper burial would have been too
expensive - both in time and money. And from the next day nobody ever remembered or missed him.
Such was the strange life and death of a great chess player and a true man of Christ.
