Reflection for the 4th Sunday of Easter (Good Shepherd Sunday)
I was asked to conduct the funeral of a woman I did not know very well but whose family lived in the parish. The woman, who was in her seventies, suffered from a particularly painful wasting disease. The pain became so great that one night she stepped out of bed, put on slippers and a dressing gown, let herself into the back garden, walked into the local lake, and drowned herself.
I visited and listened to her husband tell the story. At the funeral I talked about the things “we knew and the things we didn’t know . . . We didn’t know what anguish was going through her mind, but we did know how deeply she was loved and will be missed. We didn’t know what could bring her to such despair, but we did know that her life was beautiful and that those who knew her loved her and would always cherish what she meant to them.”
A month after the funeral, I visited the widower to see how he was doing. I half expected the usual conversation about the funeral and how the family appreciated what the parish had done for the family — maybe even say how well I had spoken, given the circumstances. But that’s not how the conversation went. The widower looked straight at me, head still and eyes unblinking, and said, “What you said was completely wrong. You said, ‘We don’t know what was going through her head when she got out of bed and walked down to the lake.’ That’s not true. I know exactly what she was thinking. She’d tried before, and afterwards she told me what it was like. I know what she was thinking. I told you that when you came to see me last time. But you weren’t listening, were you? Maybe you didn’t want to listen.” The man’s tone was more weary than angry, as if I was just one of a series of people who hadn’t really listened, either to his wife or to him.
What I learned that day has stayed with me for the rest of my life as priest.
My role is not to make things better, because that leaves the person more isolated than before. Instead, my role is to stand beside them as they face the hardest things in their life, one of which may turn out to be their fear that they could get to such an isolated place that they might consider something awful and destructive. If it’s awful, I don’t say, ‘Maybe it’s not so bad’; I say, ‘It seems very painful. I wonder which the hardest part is. Maybe you can try to put it into words so I can share the thing that’s giving you so much pain to be thinking about on your own.’
If you have a choice between giving someone false hope and giving them the truth, always give them the truth. Once they realize the hope is false, they’ll be worse off than before. But if they can name and face the truth — and find that they’re still here and they haven’t scared you away — then they may learn the path to life: if we stay with the truth and walk through it, then we can come out the other side and find we’re still alive. If they do that, they’re on the other side of hell, and hell can’t hurt them in the same way as before.”
That for me this is the role of “shepherding” that Jesus calls each one of us to take on: to walk and lead one another through the steep paths and dangerous ridges we all must walk, not diminishing the danger or pain but helping one another make our way through it. The challenge of taking up the Good Shepherd’s staff is to face the truth despite our own fears, to search for God’s light, even if it is only a flicker, in the midst of overwhelming darkness, to reach out to grab another despite our own tenuous grasp. In our own acts of generosity, love and forgiveness, we echo and give voice to the Risen Christ and the good news of hope and grace that is Easter resurrection.