My Sheep Hear My Voice.

A reflection on the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 2013

Thereadings this Sunday call us to martyrdom; to witness in strength and love to the Lamb who shepherds us and fills us with His joy.  How do we gain the confidence of Paul and Barnabas to be a witness to the truth of the Gospel?

 

John: 10:27-30

Jesus said:  “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.  No one can take them out of my hand.  My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.  The Father and I are one.”

 Luke's drawing of him listening to Jesus

Do you know His voice?  How do you learn to hear his voice?  These were questions that came up in our recent Kyrion meeting.  Kyrion is a prayer group for children that we have at our parish.   We are a small group under the umbrella of One Heart~One Fire.  The format for our small but faithful group starts with praise of God in song, an opening prayer, then we read, discuss, act out, meditate and journal on the Gospel for the upcoming Sunday.  We end with prayer.  We are trying to ignite a love for the Father in the hearts of the children, and to lead their hearts to know His voice.  And we are faithful and obedient to the teachings of our Church.  She is our guide into the heart of Christ.  Yet, it is a tall order.  There is an initial discomfort among all the children.  Jesus sometimes says strange things, challenging things.  It may be easier to keep a safe distance.   Even the children perceive this and our culture encourages it.

And this stirs up a bit of nervousness.  Truly, If you were to walk into our room in the middle of one of our meetings you would see what may look like chaos, in fact, it often feels like chaos to me (especially if I happened to have my toddler, Max, along).  To our eyes the rambunctious children do not seem to be ready or able listen and hear the Word of the Lord.  But our eyes miss a lot.   It is hard to perceive the very small movements of God in the ordinary messiness of our daily lives.

After my first few, very, very, VERY noisy and rowdy Kyrion meetings this year, I was tempted to give in to the feeling that it really was not worth the effort on a Friday afternoon, when I would much rather go home and relax with my family after a long week.  After all, we went to Mass that day, we will pray our nightly decade of the Rosary with the children before they go to bed…what more do we need to do?  Yes, Mass and devotion to our Blessed Mother are foundational to this ministry, but God has shown me, through many different means, how dangerous the attitude of "I have done enough" can be.  It can seduce you to compartmentalize faith.  It can induce a complacency in our soul and - I think we can see this in our culture - this complacency reduces our ability to love others with the passionate and fiery love of Christ; with a love that witnesses His love.  We will become lukewarm.  We will not be able to perceive evil, we will be easily deceived and truth will be inverted.  Thus I persevere with our other families. I have learned, over the course of the years how much He can do with a little perseverance on my part.  I am learning to notice the still,  small movements of His Spirit which reveal that the sheep are listening.

Sophia's drawing of Jesus

In fact, on many Sundays, when the Gospel is read at Mass (or during the children’s liturgy he sometimes attends) my son Luke will comment on how we read that in Kyrion, or how he got to play the part of Jesus in that Gospel during Kyrion, or how he drew a picture of Jesus when we journaled on the Gospel.  He is engaged in the readings at Mass in a way that he would not otherwise be.  He is given permission to understand that the Word of God is written for him.  This is not selfish, it is learning to recognize the voice of the Lamb, the shepherd of His people.  In fact, it is giving him the courage to respond to His word in a way that will witness to others.   And he will need the courage; our children will need to know the voice of Jesus.  For some form of martyrdom awaits all of us who listen to and obey the shepherd’s voice, but we are assured that even if we suffer for His sake in this world the Father will not allow you to be lost.

I, John, had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race people, and tongue.  They stood before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.  Then one of the elders said to me, “These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.  “For this reason they stand before God’s temple.  The one who sits on the throne will shelter them.  They will not hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun or any heat strike them.  For the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of life-giving water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”  Rev 7:9, 14 B-17

So it is imperative that we learn to hear His voice!  We need to teach our children that He is always speaking to us.  In our meeting, we ran a simple game with our children.  They were each blindfolded, and we (their mothers) scattered around the room and all called to them.  They had to listen and discern where their parent was.  They all succeeded.  Why?  Because they live with us, because they communicate with us.  They have learned to know our voices for their own safety, and for their individual needs for nurturing and love.  We learn to hear His voice by living with Him every day, in His Word, in prayer, by frequently coming to Him in adoration, in the Sacraments, in repentance.   Do you know His voice?  You must or you will be lead astray. You must know His voice and be prepared;  because sometimes He asks His followers to do hard things.  To love impossible people.  To forgive unspeakable crimes.  To proclaim Him in terrifying situations.  But in Him you can endure times of great distress, and confidently rejoice that your will be worthy of everlasting life where God Himself will wipe away every tear.

We are His people the sheep of His flock!  Amen!  Alleluia!

Heidi 

Why Are You Still Sleeping? A Palm Sunday Reflection

A reflection on Palm Sunday's Gospel of the Passion of the Lord

March 24, 2013

Then going out, he went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, and the disciples followed him.  When he arrived at the place he said to them, “Pray that you may not undergo the test.”  After withdrawing about a stone’s throw  from them and kneeling, he prayed saying, Father, if you are willing to take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done.”  And to strengthen him an angel from heaven appeared to him.  He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground.  When he rose from prayer and returned to his disciples, he found them sleeping from grief.  He said to them “Why are you sleeping?”  Get up and pray that you may not undergo the test.”  Luke 22: 39-46

I am completely overwhelmed by the readings for this Sunday.  They are rich, but so familiar, that it takes quite a lot of readings to settle myself down into prayer.  Since the readings are so familiar every distraction claims priority in my ill focused mind.   The words “Why are you still sleeping?” keep echoing back to me.  Sleeping?  Me?  

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“Why are you still sleeping?”

Don’t you love the persistence of our Lord when you have allowed a smidgen of His word to penetrate your heart?  Yet, much like the befuddled, grief stricken apostles, I have no idea where I am being led with this question.  It is much easier to fall asleep, to complacently put aside His request for my attention rather than allow His word to unsettle dormant desires in my soul.  I like feeling like I have everything under control.  But when you let the word of Jesus echo in your heart and mind, you will soon feel a stirring in your soul; the troubling of sleepy, complacent waters.  And yes, you will find that all is not well there, you need Him, desperately.   Persist, be brave and keep praying!  Because you and I are needed when the hour of darkness falls on us in our own time. 

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“Why are you still sleeping?”

The call of Christ to awaken in each of us the desire to cultivate a heart of unceasing prayer is becoming more and more urgent.  Maybe I am feeling this way because recently, at a Lenten retreat, I was struck by an image a gentleman shared with us.  He received this image during our meditation time.  At first he had been a little distracted by the fast paced music that was playing quietly in the background, thinking that it was not very “Lenten”.  But he persisted in his prayer and soon enough he settled in and could see in his mind Jesus walking very quickly with His disciples following behind.  The man caught up with Jesus and asked him why He was walking so fast.  Jesus replied “because there is not much time.”  It sent chills down my spine.

Or maybe it is because our new Pope Francis has, like Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, pinpointed spiritual poverty as the prevailing sickness of the wealthier nations of the world.  And it is a sickness that has left us sleepy and complacent as objective truths are replaced with the dictatorship of relativism.  We are being enslaved by our baser desires, and many of us are not in the least bit aware of it. The farther we go down this path the harder it is to desire truth - to seek it out with the energy and fervor that are needed to stay awake and endure in the dark mysteries of life, and we have already progressed so far down this path as a culture.  The words of Jesus in the gentleman’s meditation “there is not much time” fall even harder on my heart after I hear this.

Why are you still sleeping?”

  Remember the C.S. Lewis quote that I used in my post on John 6 last summer?  It was a quote, spoken by an elderly Christian man as they await a decisive battle against evil, from his book That Hideous Strength:

Have you ever noticed,.....that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?....I mean this,....If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family- anything you like- at a given point in its history you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and codices are even more momentous.  Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse:  the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing."  Pg.280-281

 In our distracted, social networked, trans-gendered, create- your- own- truth world the time we have to reach souls is diminishing fast.  We are entering into a time where straddling between faith and culture will no longer be possible.  Are we doing enough?  Are we giving our young ones, not just words of truth, but a living relationship with Truth Himself? Are we teaching our own little ones how to pray more deeply and more intimately with Christ, so that their love for their Lord will override the incredible pressure to side with a culture that increasingly cannot acknowledge objective truth, and is, in fact, hostile to it? If not we need to wake up, and we need to wake up now.  If we cannot teach our own children that Jesus wants you to persist in prayer, through all the struggles and through all the grief in our lives, how in the world are we going to be light for those who lurk in some of the darkest shadows of despair? And, again, the pervasive and growing hostility to our faith, as well asl the ever-present distractions that surround us, make these outreaches even more urgent!

“Why are you still sleeping?"

One way to help us to awaken those around us who practice our faith, but may not live it intentionally, is to teach about prayer and to let every one know that it is in prayer that we learn to love Jesus with passion and with courage! It is in prayer that we begin to discern His voice, and as we persist through our distractions and through our sleepiness, we will begin to know that He is always intimately present. We really need to let the Spirit into our imaginations and let Jesus show us how we are written into His story. To give to one another the courage to cry out to Jesus like Bartimaeus did, persistently.  Or to run the gauntlet of accusers -- those 'voices' that discourage us and would keep us from seeking out the Lord --  like the sinful women with the alabaster jar; so that you can weep at His feet and receive His tender love and forgiveness.  We need to give our young people the inheritance that is theirs by their baptism. They are sons and daughters of the Father.

If you have perceived that persistent call of Jesus, to awaken your soul to prayer and to help others awaken as well , as always He does not leave us orphaned and alone.  There are growing ministries responding to this call.  One that I participate in that has focused on reaching out to our children is One Heart ~ One Fire Ministries.  

Peace and Grace to all of you!

Heidi

Update:

Here is another link, to an article written by Matthew Archbold on the National Catholic Register.  Again, I can her His voice:  "Why are you still sleeping!"