04/27/2021
More about Good Shepherd Sunday, and the sheep who know the shepherd’s voice.
Evening meditation: Knowing God's voice
(Today's Gospel: Jn 10:1-10)
Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, I had zero experience with either sheep or shepherds. I went to a petting zoo in the local mall and, once, in elementary school we went to a working farm called Merrymead, and I saw cows for the first time, and petted them and maybe petted some more sheep too.
But other than buying all-wool LL Bean sweaters in college, I didn’t have much experience with or much interest in sheep, shepherds or shepherding, growing up. So when I entered the Jesuit novitiate, while some of the parables made sense—I mean, I had seen lilies (if not in a field), and I could imagine (even though I’d never seen one) that a mustard seed was small, and I knew that the wind blows where it will, any insights on sheep—whether they were dumb, smart, stupid, clean, dirty, lazy, friendly, loyal, disloyal, dirty or clean, or in any way admirable or not—eluded me.
That changed when I worked in Kenya during my regency with the Jesuit Refugee Service in the early 1990s. The JRS office I worked out of was in a neighborhood called Kangemi, which was rather poor, semi-rural and near many little farms. So it was not surprising to see on the way to work, shepherds and sheep. Often. We were not very far from where the Maasai live, and so you would regularly see Maasai shepherds, in their distinctive red-and-black plaid cloaks, or "shukas." The youngest Maasai boys tended sheep; the adolescents, goats; and the oldest ones, cows. So when you saw from a distance a group of sheep, or goats or cows you could pretty much guess the age of the one herding them.
One day, when I was driving outside of Nairobi, near the Rift Valley, in our little jeep, on a hillside, a lamb darted in front of me, left to right, and I barely avoided hitting him. I was on a road on the side of a cliff. And I looked down to the right side, and the lamb was climbing down the steep rocky incline with some difficulty. Within a few seconds a Maasai boy also darted in front of my car, in hot pursuit, and saw me and smiled and waved. Then he climbed down the mountain after the sheep. I looked up to the left and I saw a large flock on the hillside, which he had left waiting.
And I thought to myself--and I’m not making this up out of false humility, “That’s so dumb! He’s leaving the rest of the flock for that one sheep?” And I laughed out loud, realizing that I was seeing in action the Parable of the Good Shepherd who leaves the 99, or the 20 or so in this case, to find the lost one. It was strange to see how that parable which made sense in the abstract was a real challenge in real life.
Anyway, back to that JRS office. One day one of the Kenyan workers in our office, named Virginia, came to me and said, “Brother Jim, kuna kondoo hapa,” which means, “There are sheep here.” My Swahili was not bad by that point, but I thought, “There are sheep here?”
So I went to the front door and there was a flock of about 20 sheep and a Maasai boy, on our lawn. They were just grazing there, placidly. The shepherd asked if they could remain, and I said yes, and I went back to work with the refugees. About an hour later I came out for some fresh air and I waved to him again and apparently the sheep were finished, and he said, quietly but firmly to them, “Kuja hapa!” Come here. Every single sheep looked up immediately. And, by the way, there were many other sounds coming in the area: people talking on the dirt path near our office, roosters crowing away, car horns, and so on. But they heard his voice. And they immediately started following him. And of course I thought of today’s reading.
The key in the spiritual life is to recognize God’s voice and follow it with as much alacrity as those sheep did that day, maybe 20 years ago. In our prayer and our daily life I think most of us know how to do that. God’s voice is always the voice of hope, encouragement, uplift, possibility, newness. There’s a quality about it, a timbre, of the kind of quality that the sheep recognized in that Maasai boy. But as companions to one another, we’re also called to help others come to know that voice.
So we have multiple roles as Christians. We are invited to come to know that voice ourselves, we help others come to know that voice and as shepherds we sometimes speak that voice. So it’s a multivalent role for the disciple. Sometimes the sheep, sometimes the shepherd. Sometimes the listener, sometimes the speaker.
In my own life, I think I’m pretty good at recognizing and knowing the voice. I mean, I look up like the sheep when I hear it. But I don’t always follow through by following it. After all, the sheep could have heard the Maasai boy and just went back to grazing.
But they don’t. They just don’t hear him, they follow them. Why? Because they trust him. They know he has their best interests at heart, they know he’ll climb down a cliff to find them if they wander off or if they’re somehow pushed away from the flock—Richard Rohr imagines the lost sheep being excluded by the other sheep and brought back to the flock by the Good Shepherd.
Most of all they know that the shepherd loves them, just as God loves us. And calls to us every moment of our lives.
