The Shepherds in Bethlehem and the light of vocation…

When Saint Luke recounts the Christmas story, it tells us that, when Jesus was born, shepherds were keeping watch in the night, and a light shone in the darkness.

Christ borns in our world like a light. God comes inside of what’s commonplace and inside as well in the darkness of sin, or violence, or war, or greed, and the indifference, that sometimes appear everywhere. God is light that being seen inside of darkness.One of the things that Christmas asks us to do is to imitate the shepherds and keep watch, hoping to see “light inside of darkness”. Because God is inside ordinary life and our job is to see God there, sometimes also, amid the darkness.

Classically, this was expressed in the concept of “divine providence”, namely, the notion that inside the conspiracy of accidents that shape our lives we can see the finger of God writing history from another point of view. God shines forth, in some way, in everything that happens.

We are like the shepherds when we look at our world, with all that’s in it, both good and bad, and see light there, namely, God’s presence, grace, graciousness, forgiveness, love, unselfishness, innocence. The darkness surrounding our world is deep. We live in a world where what we see is often simply bitterness, wound, non- forgiveness, anger, greed, false pride, lust, injustice, and sin. Where do we see light inside of that?

Light comes to our lives and Christmas speaks of childlikeness, wonder, innocence, joy, love, forgiveness, family, community, and giving. These make light shine in the darkness. Christ told us that we are the light of the world… ¿Do we really are light for others?

We can see light in darkness most clearly and easily in the face of a newborn, a baby, where innocence can still stun us into wonder and soften, for a while, the edges of our cynicism and hardness. That, in fact, is one of the main challenges of Christmas… But, we need to see the light and to be light not only in the moment of Christmas or facing a newborn baby…

Like the shepherds we’re asked to watch in the night and we’re watching when, in our hearts, there is more wonder than familiarity, more childlike trust than cynicism, more love than indifference, more forgiveness than bitterness, more joy in our innocence than in our sophistication, and more focus on others than on ourselves.

I think Christmas is a good time to see that the world lives in darknes and the world needs shepherds like the Christmas’s shepherds in Betlehem. Men that with open eyes listen the voices of angels and go to the manger like them… I think is a good time to think in vocation.

Priests are called «pastors», shepherds that always are watching the light of Christ that shining in the darkness. Men full of mercy and light for all the souls. Men poor, detached, generous. Men that lead the flock always to find Christ.

Do you like to be a pastor?

Fr. Alfredo Delgado.