I took this weekend off from writing to clear my head (am reliving the years immediately after my husband died as I work on this chapter of Everyday Annunciations, and juggling with so many moving parts in this chapter), and that has proven a very good thing–as well as good timing. Happily, spring has finally come to Southeast Idaho, with 70s and sun, and I was able take a 8-mile walk in the National Forest, to address my out-of-control messy house, to knit and relax with an audiobook.
But when writing is what you do, you’re never “off,” it seems, and Sunday’s mass at Holy Spirit Parish, Pocatello, where I was cantor accompanied by my wonderful friend, the guitarist Bill O’Brien, opened gates of new thinking that I’m eager to apply literally and slantingly this week. As you may know this Sunday is designated in the Catholic Church out of all the year as “Good Shepherd Sunday” because of its consistent Gospel reading; I sang the 23rd Psalm as the Responsorial. We had a visiting Kenyan priest, and he shared first-hand awareness from his home country about how sheep do, indeed, know their keeper’s voice and respond to them but not to strangers whose voices are unfamiliar (he demonstrated the really neat burbling calls one might make in Kenya to one’s flock). That got me thinking and smiling about my three kitty girls and how I use distinctive intonations collectively and individually with them, how they do indeed know their names and read the tone. I’ve been calling them “the herd” recently in daily morning texts with my “daughter,” and the sense that I too am in a very modest sense a “shepherd” (catherd?) delighted me.
As I sang the communion hymn, though (“Shepherd Me, O God”) and looked out as the people in church processed to share in that sacrament, another, more weighty reading of that text shook me. We writers, after all, especially those of us who write about matters of spiritual life, are also “shepherds” in a way, people with the potential to help others along the way, to give them succor and inspire them as they grapple with life’s challenges. That does not mean simple bland cheerleading and religious jargon, in my view, but companioning on a complex path and the sharing of a hard-won insight that says, “Me, too.” As I watched the faces, I vowed to think about what those people might need and I might give them as I took up the writing work again on the morrow, to work even more consciously with them in mind.
Still temporarily on “vacation,” though, I spent yesterday afternoon tending another kind of overdue responsibility, my garden only lately bare of snow, weeding and clearing winter’s dead debris, delighting in thinking of this as a kind of “shepherding” too, of the plant critters depending on me.
A little silly? Maybe. But how the day shone with meaning. And how I loved the fresh green garlic shoots for new potatoes and fresh mint for peas revealed under the debris, repaying the labor in full.
What are you shepherding these days?
