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.

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.

Shepherds: Saying Yes to Our Poverty

Luke 2:8 – 20
And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,
“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.


The birth of Jesus does not happen in a palace, in an estate, or in an ambassador’s enclave. Jesus is born to Mary and Joseph in a cave that is used as a stable, a poor couple giving birth to a child outside of propriety . . . a stable, a feed-trough.

And the birth of this child is announced not in a palace by royal herald, nor by fleet-footed messenger sent from one dignitary to another. The angelic messengers are sent to a hillside, to the poorest of the poor, to those who have nothing of their own . . . shepherds who are tending their work, trying to make a living wage . . . day-laborers, working for daily bread.

The angels proclaim that this birth is good new of great joy for ALL people, and enact that inclusiveness by making the pronouncement to those who had no social standing: shepherds.

This is the birth announcement of God’s very own Son, proclaimed first of all southeast of downtown Houston to the men gathered in the parking lot in front of Home Depot on Gulf Freeway, hoping to be hired by a construction foreman who stops at Home Depot to pick up supplies for the day.

This is the birth of Jesus proclaimed first to the men who wait in front of the apartment complex on Market Street in East Houston, waiting for someone to hire them to do yard work . . . hoping for a wave of the hand that will invite them into the back of a pickup truck . . . a day of manual labor in exchange for a few dollars cash.

This is the coming of Christ told to the women going door to door, stuffing doorposts with handwritten notes offering their housekeeping services, hoping and praying that someone, anyone will open the door and offer them a couple of hours of work.

This is the Good News of God announced to anyone who has worked for a daily wage, who has literally depended on daily bread, who knows what it means to turn over every stone in hopes of earning manna for the day.

This birth narrative is large enough to include – and prioritize? – the poverty of shepherds, but it is not only about the poverty of the shepherds who received this first announcement.

I believe that every single person you will ever meet – including yourself – is poor in some way. Somehow these shepherds are present within every one of us. We each have our own poverty, some way in which we are poor.

Most of us hear the word “poverty” or the word “poor” and we default to a particular image of someone who has little money, or someone who lives in a particular setting. When we hear the word “poverty” we default to a narrow image of what poverty looks like . . . what it means to be poor. But poverty is not primarily about money and possessions. Poverty is about our humanity, our limitation, our human lack. Every person reading this, no matter how much money you have, no matter the size of your home, no matter how many cars are in the garage . . . every one of us is poor in some way.

We may be poor in spirit . . . poverty of emotional expression . . . lack creativity . . . some disability of body or of energy . . . our poverty may be our health. We each, usually in multiple ways, lack something.

There is not one kind of poverty. We are each poor in some way.

And believe it or not, the beginning of the spiritual journey is to acknowledge our lack, to acknowledge our poverty. In humility, we are invited to recognize that there are parts of each of us that are empty, where we are not complete . . . so that rather than coming to God with our arms full of money or possessions or education or success or accomplishments or straight A’s, we come to God with open arms, aware of our poverty, aware of our dependence on God and others.

Augustine, centuries ago, said it this simply: “God is always waiting to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.”

For Reflection:

How do you react to hearing that you are poor? that poverty is part of what you are? I remind you that this is not cause for shame. Our poverty, rather, is simply about our humanity, saying to us that we are not complete and full, that there is always room in us for Christ to be born.