Today, we celebrate the 4th Sunday of the Easter season. We are finished with our busy Holy Week liturgies and our
students are back from spring break.
Now, we are really busy with the end of the school year, with first communion,
confirmation, the baccalaureate mass for graduating seniors, and the end of our
programs before the summer starts. In
the midst of our busy lives, we celebrate Good Shepherd Sunday today in the midst of the Easter season. Jesus, our Good Shepherd, calls his sheep to himself. He calls his sheep into union with his
Father. For
the last couple of years, Good Shepherd Sunday has also been the World Day of
Prayer for Vocations.
As
disciples of Christ, we are called hear the voice of our Good Shepherd: a voice
that leads us, guides us, and helps us on our journey. There
are so many roads we can travel down in life. There
are so many voices call out to us. But
there is only one Good Shepherd. Our
Good Shepherd and our Church are there to help us find our vocation in life and
to nurture that vocation. However, this
can only happen if we are engaged in that journey, if we commit ourselves to
following Jesus as our Good Shepherd.
So
what are some points we can ponder today on Good Shepherd Sunday in regard to
vocations? Indeed, finding our vocation in life is important, whatever that vocation may
be, but in our prayers for vocations today, we especially highlight the various vocations
in our Church: to the priesthood, diaconate, consecrated religious life, and
lay ministry. First, we can say that God calls us in the midst of both our gifts and our
imperfections to serve in ministry. The
late Father Henri Nouwen calls those in ministry in the Church "wounded healers", highlighting the way all of us are sinners and the way all of us have our faults. Again
and again in the Gospels, we see Jesus calling different individuals to
ministry in the midst of their imperfections and weaknesses. In
our ministry, we don’t live our lives exactly as Christ lived his. Instead,
those called to a vocation in ministry in the Church are called to live as
authentically as Christ lived, with there being many ways and forms in which we
live out our Christian vocation in faithfulness, service, and humility.
Another point we can make about our call to a vocation is that we give of
ourselves in order to find ourselves. Pope
Francis has said that the best way to discern a vocation in the Church is to go
on a mission trip, to volunteer at a soup kitchen, to spend time with the poor,
to visit the sick in the hospitals or in the nursing homes, and to be of
service in our parish. When
we go outside of our comfort zones to serve others, God can speak very
powerfully to us indeed. Yet,
this also has to be accompanied by our devotion to prayer and the Eucharist and
the spiritual aspects of our faith as well. Our charitable
works do not just come out of good intentions and altruism, but from our very
faith itself. Our faith and good works must
be intrinsically connected and must complement each other.
Finally, we could say, as we are called to discern our own vocation and to help
others in their discernment, we are called to be a messenger of mercy. What better message could we have in this
Year of Mercy? We
need to encourage others to go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, to find love
and mercy in the loving arms of Mary, our Mother, and to reach out to others
who have fallen away from the faith. The
message of Pope Francis and Pope Benedict is that we need a new evangelization,
that we need to evangelize ourselves in order to be able to evangelize others,
to rediscover ourselves what it really means to be Catholic and to commit to
that way of life.
We
can hear Jesus, the Good Shepherd, calling out to us in many ways: through
prayer, through reading his Holy Word, through our experiences in the
Sacraments of the Church, and through our service to the people of God. In
our faith, we are to respond to the vocation the Good Shepherd is calling us
to, we are to help others make the choice to follow their vocation, no matter how
hard or different or overwhelming this may seem. As we
talk about vocations today, we are going to have the chance to hear from one of
our confirmation students give a faith testimony, to hear about his journey
through the confirmation process and his experiences with the risen Christ as
he journeys toward the Sacrament of Confirmation in a few short weeks.
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