Today, the 4th Sunday of the Easter Season, is certainly a busy day
for us at our masses this weekend. We celebrate
“Good Shepherd Sunday” today as we hear readings that identify Jesus as our
Good Shepherd, that identify us as the sheep of his flock. We
also celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend – a day that is really important to us
in recognizing the love and influence that our mothers have had in our lives. The
Vatican designates this day as the 51st World Day of Prayer for
Vocations. And
the fourth thing we celebrate this weekend in our baccalaureate mass, as we
honor our graduating seniors. As I
said, a lot of important things going on this weekend.
On
Good Shepherd Sunday, we celebrate the way Jesus is our Good Shepherd. In
our Gospel reading from John, we hear about Jesus as the gate through which the
sheep enter the sheepfold, as the door through which we receive our salvation. Recently,
Pope Francis said that Jesus as our shepherd walks the paths of our ordinary
lives to draw near to us, to help us in our needs and in our infirmities. As
Jesus walks with us and interacts with our lives, he calls us to a vocation. As we
walk with Jesus as his disciples, it is Christ himself who beckons us to a
vocation in life. Pope Francis explains that every vocation,
even within the variety of paths, requires an exodus from oneself in order to
center our lives on Christ and on his Gospel. In
choosing a vocation and living out a vocation, we must overcome the ways of
thinking and acting that do not conform to the will of God. All
vocations in some way consist of some sort of service to God and to our
brothers and sisters.
This
weekend, as we celebrate Baccalaureate with our high school seniors, we see our
seniors leaving high school and getting ready to go off to college or to enter
the work force. They are thinking of
the vocation that they want to pursue in their lives. One
thing that Pope Francis said really struck me: No vocation is born of itself –
no vocation lives of itself. A
vocation flows from God’s heart and it blossoms among the people.
Everyone
is called to find his true vocation that God helps them choose, no matter what
that vocation is. Today, we also pray in a special way for vocations to the priesthood, religious
life, and lay ministry. As
you know, that is a concern in our Diocese and throughout the Church. Many
of the priests in our diocese working are past retirement age. We
diocese relied on Irish priests for decades, and now we have 8 priests working
in the diocese from India. Since
the inception of our diocese more the 175 years ago, we have relied on priests
from other places to staff our needs. I can
count myself in that number of priest who came to our diocese with a heart of
service, who came to serve as missionaries in a missionary diocese. It is
great that we have priests coming from other places that hear the call to serve
the Church and God’s people in Mississippi – but we also need to cultivate vocations to
the priesthood, religious life, and lay ministry in our parishes and in our
vocation. The
theme for this day of prayer for vocations is: Vocations – A Witness to Truth. In
whatever vocation we are called to, we recognize that in our vocation, we must
be true to ourselves and true to God, true to the calling that we have in life.
It
all comes down to who is our Shepherd?
Who do we follow in life? Who
leads us and guides us. As we
continue our joyful Easter season, may the Lord continue to be the shepherd of
our lives.
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