On Wusses,
Wolves and the Wilderness: Reimagining God and Leadership through the Good Shepherd On Wusses,
Wolves and the Wilderness: Reimagining God and Leadership through the Good Shepherd On Wusses, Wolves
and the Wilderness: Reimagining God and Leadership through the Good Shepherd

On Wusses, Wolves and the Wilderness: Reimagining God and Leadership through the Good Shepherd

Since 1970, this coming Sunday has been known as “Good Shepherd Sunday” in the Catholic Church.  The congregation hears Jesus describe himself as the gate/door through which the sheep can pass safely (and in the next verse, which is not actually read aloud, Jesus refers to himself as the Good Shepherd.)  Forgive me for stating the obvious, but a shepherd is a person entrusted with the care of a flock of sheep!  By extension of that and Jesus’ self-designation as the Good Shepherd, the word has also become associated with the sense of being a spiritual guide, a doctor of the soul and a Christian minister or member of the clergy.  The Latin word pastus is the past participle of pascere, which means “to lead to pasture, graze or eat”, and so a synonym for shepherd is pastor. The notion of “pastoral care” is a very familiar term today, by which countless institutions (like Beaulieu) have departments designed to provide places of comfort, care, sustenance and support for the members of their community.  Whether the character of such departments be theistic or non-religious, they all trace their etymological roots back to this ancient Jewish-Christian image.

Sheep are thought of as soft and woolly, but those adjectives certainly do not apply to a good shepherd!  In the time of Jesus, flocks often consisted of thousands of sheep, and so the sheer number required tough, courageous, resilient and highly skilled men to guard them.  Shepherd and sheep spent March to mid-November together on the vast open highlands, while winter was spent under cover.  The hills of Palestine were full of wolves, jackals, hyenas and rustlers - any decent shepherd carried a club to bludgeon man and beast alike!  Unlike the image of the priest in the popular mindset today (I suspect), the shepherd was not perceived as a wuss; on the contrary, his grit, courage, guile and fidelity were legendary up and down that harsh land!  When the young David was trying to convince King Saul to let him fight the Philistine colossus Goliath, it was ultimately David’s pastoral background that persuaded the king to let him have a pop at it.  (“The bigger they are, the harder they fall!” as my Dad used to tell me when an opponent towered over me at the weigh-in for a fight.  85 fights and 10 years later I finally told him that it was equally true that the bigger they are, the harder they also hit!)

The figure of the nomadic, tough, robust, courageous, loving and fundamentally good pastor, tending his sheep to the point where he is willing to surrender his life for them, is implicit in the image Jesus uses about himself in Sunday’s Gospel. After decades of pastoral work myself, however, I suspect that the image that countless people have of God is not this one, but a much harsher one.  Many decades ago, starting out as a young and very green priest back in the north of England and after only 8 weeks in my first parish, I was asked to officiate at a funeral 20 miles away of a young woman in her late teens. She had died from an overdose.  It was tragic - her life had hardly got going, she had decades in front of her, her recent GCSE and A-level qualifications had only just been put on a CV, her degree course was only about 3 weeks underway, and, no doubt, a promising (if as yet unchosen) career lay ahead of her.  As I prepared the funeral with the family in their home, it gradually dawned on me that her grandmother’s face was etched with anxiety.  It turned out that this was because her beloved grandchild, a young woman barely out of adolescence, had taken her own life, and her Nana feared for her salvation.  Wonderfully, unforgettably - an aunt calmed Grandma (the names are changed): “No, don’t you be worrying, Beryl.  God is good and he’s not daft!  Listen, if I were Saint Peter [Peter is the traditional celestial gatekeeper in the Catholic imagination, because “the keys of the kingdom” were given to him by Jesus], I’d let our Sam in…she had such a good heart, full of fun, always looking out for others!”  This beautiful and theologically astute line from her Auntie Theresa - “God is good, and he’s not daft!” - became the basis of my homily a few days later at the Funeral Mass.  I tried to reassure everyone present that Sam, a young, inexperienced girl with a good heart full of fun and loving concern for others, was being lovingly embraced by the Good Shepherd, whose whole life was spent looking out for others.  I reminded everyone present that if even we - with all our messed-upness, our imperfect understanding, our less than consistent compassion towards the failings of others, and our never-far-from-the-surface nosey judgmentalism about other people’s lives - if even we were able to see through this young girl’s struggles to perceive the goodness of a heart that just needed a bit more time, a bit more love and a bit more of the rub of the green to then be able to blossom into all that she could have been, all that her life could have been, well isn’t it obvious that God could perceive this much more?  Sometimes people who write and teach about God think God is as narrow, petty, mean and stupid as they are!  They certainly do not see God as the Good Shepherd revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, leading us home.

A final thought.  In this Sunday’s gospel, Jesus also explains the key difference between a trustworthy shepherd (often the youngest son in the family) and a hired hand (a last resort when a family either had no sons or too many sheep for the youngest son to handle).  The true shepherd risks his life for the sheep, whereas the hireling runs away at the first sign of trouble.  A good shepherd asks, “What do the sheep need here?” The hired hand asks, “What do I need here?”  The shepherd sees pastoral care as a vocation, a way of improving the world, something to which s/he has been “called” by some strange combination of genetics, temperament, life and (if they believe) God.  The hired hand sees it as a path to self-advancement.  Hirelings are usually opportunists who tend not to give more than they get.  Please don’t misunderstand me: “What’s in it for me?” is a question we must ask because we all have bills to pay, families to feed and gifts to contribute as we build a career.  No one is denying that a healthy self-interest is important, up to a certain point in life.  You can’t give yourself away to others if you don’t have a healthy sense of self.  But for an authentic leader - anyone with pastoral responsibility for children, colleagues, partner, spouse, parents, friends or parishioners - the first question is always, “What do those who depend on me need here?”

Saint Teresa of Ávila said that spiritual maturity is not about denying our ego but being content to integrate it into a larger group identity.  I will be important and treasured for who I am in Heaven…but so will anyone else who is there!  Have a lovely weekend, Beaulieu!