Every once in a while, right out of the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, come powerful lessons in shepherding, such as found in playwright director Garson Kanin’s book, Hollywood.

Kanin tells of Charles Laughton’s going to New York to do a radio broadcast for Tony Sanford – a long poem called “The Hudson” by Carl Carmer.

In his hotel suite, with a leg thrown over a chair, Laughton read the poem so movingly Sanford was close to tears. Yet, on the following day in the studio, the harder Laughton tried, the more wooden became his performance.

Sanford reminded him of how well he had done in his hotel room the night before, and Laughton asked if he might broadcast from there. Since that was out of the question, Sanford sent a man over to bring the chair to the studio.

The microphone was lowered, Laughton sat in the chair, threw his leg over the arm and gave the most sensitive reading Sanford could have desired.

Kanin tells of a similar experience he had with the actor while shooting “They Knew What They Wanted” in the Napa Valley. One night, as Kanin was sitting on an hacienda, talking with friends, Laughton jumped out of a truck, looking disheveled. He approached Kanin and told him he couldn’t possibly do a scene scheduled for the next morning.

Together, the two walked up and down the rows of peach trees in a nearby orchard, making adjustments here and there, but never quite getting it right. It grew dark. Finally, Laughton stopped in a clearing, acted the scene through brilliantly, and shouted in glee, “I’ve got it!”

But the following morning, it was apparent he had lost it overnight. He tried and tried, and finally said with tears in his eyes, “I’ve lost it.”

Jokingly, Kanin asked him, “Where do you suppose you lost it?”

“In the orchard,” Laughton replied. “I lost it in the orchard.”

The director, actor and assistants drove nine miles in search of the actor’s Muse in the middle of a peach orchard. And they found what would become, in Kanin’s estimation, the best scene of the picture.

How Christ-like were the two men, reaching out in sympathy and patience and love for the troubled Laughton. In doing so, they saved what was best in him, saved what might otherwise have been crushed under the weight of despair and confusion.

We can meet healers in studios or peach orchards, over cups of coffee at kitchen tables, and we can find them at Mass, offering a place apart to find God who will help us to discover anew what we might have thought we had lost forever.

Possibly, many a parishioner comes to the Sunday liturgy, hoping that the shepherds, from the celebrant to the servers, to the lectors, to the pilgrims in the pews, will help him or her return to a personal peach orchard, where God is to be found, and where, for that brief period of time, nothing else is of any importance.

The lector’s sacred task is to spend time studying the selections for the day, pray over them, and be receptive to the messages contained in the Word, which he or she will then offer to the people in a manner that will help them to feel comforted, strengthened, enlightened and inspired.

While the words in the selections can be found in any dictionary, as expressions of God’s inspired word in Scripture, they bear a special grace, not a sacrament, but a sacramental, which creates a unique relationship with God, the people, and the lector.

The lessons of the Word are organized into three-year cycles, beginning with Advent and Christmas, and continuing through Christmas, Lent and Pentecost. Between Pentecost and Advent are the Sundays in Ordinary Time.

The readings are chosen from the Old and New Testaments, and are related to one another. The psalm is Old Testament poetry, and often in its few lines speaks to the heart with power and grace.

Dorothy Day once wrote: “In fact, to this very day, common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind.” (The Long Loneliness)

As ordinarily kind as transferring a chair from a hotel to a broadcast studio, or finding a peach orchard for a genius who had lost his way.

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