Since the book of Ezechial usually leaves me searching the shelves for relief from an impending depression, it was with interest that I read the assessment of the three leading prophets in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary:

“Jeremiah is all gloom. Ezechial begins with gloom but ends with consolation, while Isaiah is all consolation.”

Yet, I happily found that the passage from Ezechial for August18th did not prompt me to look elsewhere for inspiration. Not only had the prophet captured the compassion of the Good Shepherd, he did so in a way that answered the yearning of sheep in this century that finds our world spinning out of control, and dangerously close to self-immolation. Let's take a look:

Thus says the Lord God: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves! Should not shepherds, rather, pasture sheep?

You have fed off their milk, worn their wool, and slaughtered the fatlings, but the sheep you have not pastured. You did not strengthen the weak nor heal the sick nor bind up the injured. You did not bring back the strayed nor seek the lost, but you lorded it over them harshly and brutally.

....I myself will look after and tend my sheep.

34: 1-11

It's all there, isn't it? There for the nation's shepherds: Church shepherds, education shepherds, financial shepherds, parental shepherds, etc.

No need for political conventions that tie up big city traffic, and use millions of dollars that could go to provide shelter for sheep, who call boxes under bridges their homes and garbage bins their supermarkets.

Let those who are seeking the highest office in the land take a month off from speech-making for listening, for walking quietly, assessing the damage done to the physical, mental and psychological health of the sheep by the constant state of alert, spreading fear like a deadly, invisible gas, leaving our people with a sense of dread and helplessness, sucking the oxygen of hope from the air.

There is no need for children to be left behind if superintendents and principals and teachers work together to provide the best for the smallest of their sheep, and school boards insist that salaries for educators reflect the sacred trust placed in them If the politicians were less greedy pasturing themselves, there would be money for better schools and teachers.

Nor is there a need for churches to be without shepherds, except for the fact that a committed, married priest is seen as a contradiction in terms, unless he happens to have been fortunate enough to be a married Lutheran minister, who, after some adjusting of musical chairs, can walk in the front door of the rectory with wife, children, Bible and golf clubs, while the married Roman Catholic pastor scuttles through the back door, to face an unknown future, with degrees that cannot be bartered in the business world, and Catholic schools on all levels that are closed to him.

God speaks to Ezechial about shepherds who pasture themselves.

Clericalism encourages their doing so, as Fr. Bernard Haring, in a lecture in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in December 1987, denounced what he called

“ the irritating history of the sacred alliance between the throne and the altar; a hierarchical and clerical church pleased to get wealth, honors and privileges from the powerful for favoring an unequal order which enriched the wealthy few at the expense of the impoverished masses.”

Would we be surprised to learn that clericalism drives as many priests from their ministry as the law of celibacy? They are uncomfortable in roles that separate them from their sheep, keep them from climbing high mountains in search of the lost, or to bind up the injured.

At times, we find liturgical leaders more concerned with minutiae than with shepherding the hungry people in the pews. Easier it is to wash the outside of cups. Washing is easy; patient listening is difficult and time-consuming.

Shepherding priests seem long ago to have made up their minds not to use the altar as their sphere of control, but as a kind of playground where God's people can sing and pray freely before the altar of God, not worried about every new direction from across the pond that seems to militate against prayer, as though God seeks ritual, rather than love and friendship.

If the book we have been discussing of late, Father Joe, remains on The New York Times best-seller list, it is because people are longing for real shepherds, and Father Joe is that for thousands, most of whom never met him except in turning the pages, one after another.

To all good shepherds out there, and they must number in the millions, whether married or celibate, I send a personal word of thanks. In ministering to some, you minister to all. You do not pasture yourselves, but the sheep of your flock. You do us proud, and we are a grateful people.

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