The Stray

2nd Week of Advent - Tuesday (11 December 2018)

Isaiah 40:1-11. Psalm 96:1-3,10-13. Luke 18:12-14.

“Will he not leave the ninety-nine sheep on the hillside and go in search of the stray?’”

A woman had been raised in a religious home and had been a pious and regular churchgoer. During her years at university, however, her interest and practice in religion had progressively slipped so that by the time she graduated she no longer attended church or prayed. This indifference to prayer and churchgoing continued for several years after her graduation.

One day, some four years after having given up all practice of prayer and church, she flew to Colorado to spend some time with a married sister and to do some skiing. She arrived on a Saturday evening and the next morning, Sunday, her sister invited her to go to Mass with her. She politely refused and went skiing instead. On her first run down the ski-slope she hit a tree and broke her leg. Sporting a huge cast, she was released from hospital the following Saturday. The next morning, her sister again invited her to come to Mass with her. This time (as there wasn't anything else to do) she accepted the invitation.

As luck would have it, it was Good Shepherd Sunday. As chance would have it, there happened to be a priest visiting from Israel. He could not see her, complete with cast, sitting in the pews and yet he began his homily in this way.

“There is a custom among shepherds in Israel that existed at the time of Jesus and is still practised today that needs to be understood in order to appreciate this text. Sometimes very early on in the life of a lamb, a shepherd senses that it is going to be a straying character, one forever drifting away from the herd. What the shepherd does then is to take the lamb and deliberately break its leg so that he has to carry it until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb has become so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again.”

“I may be stupid!” said this woman, “but given my broken leg and this chance coincidence, hearing this sermon woke up something inside me. Fifteen years have passed since then and I have prayed and gone to church regularly ever since!”

In a sense, there are no accidents or coincidences. Anything and everything that happens to us has a meaning. Why should so-and-so be the Prime Minister or the President at this time? Why should dad pass away suddenly? Why should my dear one be estranged from me? Why should this evil happen to my family, to this world? We don't (can't) have satisfactory answers. But only a faith vision can suggest that there are no chances from God's point of view; everything is put there (“arranged”) by God just for me, just us. Everything becomes an occasion for God and for good.

God comes to us in a thousand ways every moment of our lives. He reveals to us in everything that we encounter: this stone, that leaf, this rabbit, that tree, this sister of mine, that brother of mine, this stranger, that enemy, that star, that beggar... He manifests Himself in endless forms and faces. Everything we have ever seen with our eyes is the infinite self-emptying of God. Our job as a conscious human is ONLY to awaken (perhaps awaken early) to this inherent beauty and goodness. Why wait until heaven when we can enjoy the Divine Flow in everything we see now?

John of the Cross once said that the language of God is the experience that God writes into our lives. Divine providence, as James Mackey and George Santayana suggest, is a “conspiracy of accidents.” What this woman (in the above anecdote) experienced that Sunday was precisely the language of God, divine providence, God’s finger in her life, through a conspiracy of accidents. In her response, she read the signs of the times. The Divine Shepherd in His plan has no straying characters for long!