Shepherds: Seeing Truthfully

A healthy spirituality, one that leads a person to become who they were created to be, includes the key component of “seeing.” And more, it is about seeing truly, seeing what is real.

It seems like that should be self-evident, but it’s not. For so much of our life, we value what we are told to value – to be a good citizen, or a good family member, or a valuable employee, etc. – as determined by culture, by the social norms that surround us.

For example, the common message that saturates Western culture is that you can be complete or full . . . if you work hard enough . . . or if you achieve enough . . . or if you set your mind to it . . . or if you buy the right kind of laundry detergent. . . . In fact, the deceit of consumerism is that happiness comes from accumulating things and that it is possible to be so full of things that you don’t need anything or anyone else.

Most of us realize this is hogwash, but we fall into the trap all over again every December . . . more and more gifts for loved one . . . more and more gadgets and gizmos to keep us entertained and up-to-date.

It takes long years – and a certain difficult courage – to see that illusion for what it is, to resist the pull of the world around us.

In my first post about the shepherds in the Nativity, I said that they were characterized by poverty, need, lack, and incompleteness. Vocationally, shepherds were day-laborers, with few possessions of their own, hired to tend the sheep who were owned by someone else. They lived on the margins of propriety and the underside of society.

I suggested that you and I touch the shepherd within us, as well, because all of us are impoverished in some way. None of us, no matter how loudly the commercials scream, can manage our way to fullness or completeness. There are no magic products that will fill our deepest needs for love, mercy, compassion, and kinship. In fact, fullness and completeness – self-sufficiency – is not even a reasonable goal.

For this reason, I said in that essay that touching and embracing our poverty and incompleteness is an essential starting place for a transforming spiritual journey. Before my life can be shaped in healing, life-giving ways, I have to face my own impoverishment, I have to acknowledge my need and lack.

Most all of the world’s religious traditions teach the need to recognize our own emptiness. In fact, most of the world’s traditions also emphasize a variety of spiritual practices whose intent is to help us clear inner space for God’s interior work.

In fact, in the Christian contemplative tradition, poverty is not a problem. It is a gift, a blessing to know that you don’t know everything you need to know . . . that you don’t have everything you need to have . . . that you don’t yet possess that which makes life complete . . . that there is more of God’s depth and height and breadth yet to experience.

The birth announcement to the poorest among us, the shepherds, is also an announcement to the poorest part of us, the aspect of our lives in which we are most lacking, most in need.

When I dare to acknowledge my poverty, and to name it, I am finally freed to hear the birth announcement about this little one who fills and shapes and reorders life, this Jesus who makes life whole again.

The shepherd within us recognizes, in humility, that we are humans with limitations and boundaries . . . that Jesus’ birth is for EVERY part of me . . . and that our poverty is simply the beginning point of a deep and intimate connection with God.


For Reflection:

Think about your expectations of Christmas . . . family and friends . . . gatherings and social events . . . schedules and timelines. Take a moment to consider what it would mean to be present to those people and in those settings with a deeper sense of your own poverty . . . where you didn’t have to know every answer . . . you didn’t have to give the perfect present . . . you didn’t have to get a certain gift that would complete your life.

Spend a moment considering what “spiritual poverty” would look like for you over the next few days as Christmas approaches.