Shepherds: Connecting the Human with the Divine

The story around the Nativity of Jesus is both common and other-worldly, brimming with mystery that unites elements that sound, at the same time, familiar and unique.

The narrative includes elements that are extraordinary, signifying that this birth has cosmic consequences, that it is heavenly and bears the mark of God’s design. The signs of God’s activity are everywhere: angels appearing to a virgin . . . a mysterious, “spiritual” conception . . . an angel chorus singing over shepherds and sheep . . . a supernatural star guiding foreign mystics, who notice a new alignment in the celestial realm . . . dreams and visions sent by God and mediated by angels.

The Christmas story is also common and ordinary: a couple is expecting a child . . . a baby is born . . . a small town is bustling with crowds at census time . . . people are going about their normal work as this birth takes place, including sheep-herders who are tending their flocks of sheep in the countryside. This is everyday life.

So the story is a co-mingling of divinity and humanity, an intertwining of the heavenly and the earthly. This is especially true of the encounter of angels and shepherds in the field.

It is no accident that the angels and shepherds show up in the same story, at the same time in the Nativity. We must hold them together . . . our weakness, poverty, lack, and need (shepherds), held together with our goodness, beauty, and sense of being created in God’s image (angels), even “a little higher than the angels,” as the psalmist says.

Joan Chittister (in The Rule of Benedict: Insight for the Ages) says the rabbis teach that we each live out of two pockets. In one pocket there is a message that says, “You are the dust of the earth.” In the other pocket is a message that says, “For you the stars were made.”

To live out of only one pocket or the other is to live out of balance. If we only live out of the “dust” pocket, we are overwhelmed with our humanity, our poverty, our incompleteness, our brokenness. We get stuck in guilt and shame. In the context of the Nativity, I would call this the “shepherd pocket.”

If we only live out of our “stars” pocket, we are easily inflated, self-interested, egocentric, and full of ourselves. In the context of this story, I would call this the “angel pocket.”

Humility is not a shuffling, self-effacing, putting down of self. Humility is actually having an honest assessment of who you are . . . holding both of these pockets in balance . . . seeing both your strengths/gifts/abundance/angel in truth, AND seeing your weakness/shadow/poverty/shepherd in truth. Humility means to hold both simultaneously, without getting lost in either pocket. In that sense, humility is truly the meeting of humanity and divinity within every person.

I’m glad angels are in the story. I’m also glad shepherds are in the story. I need to find both of them within me.


For Reflection:

Spend a few minutes today on Christmas Eve to ponder the utter ordinariness of the Christmas story and its unfathomable mystery. See if you can hold both together, with space within you for both angels and shepherds.