The shepherd’s voice

This past Sunday was Good Shepherd Sunday, otherwise known as the Fourth Sunday of Easter, which sets up a series of readings from the Gospel of John on how the sheep hear and know the voice of the shepherd and will not follow a stranger.

These passages resonate with me more deeply now because of an unexpected encounter while I was out shopping.

On the ground floor of our diocesan headquarters is a bookstore and gift shop filled with the usual assortment of books, holy cards, trinkets, statues and other must-have merchandise. When I arrived, several people were already in the store, and their conversations made for quiet background noise. I was browsing the wares and paying no attention to the other customers, but suddenly I picked out one voice from among the others.

“Is that Bishop Rhoades?” I thought. Instantly my curiosity was piqued.

An important thing to understand: I was still an itty-bitty brand-new baby Catholic, maybe a month confirmed, and the idea of the bishop meandering through the bookstore was a novel idea. (Yes, I went there. I regret nothing.) This was my chance for a celebrity sighting, and I wasn’t going to miss it.

As I casually wove through the shelves, I could still hear His Excellency speaking, but I couldn’t see him. Then I rounded a corner, and at the end of the aisle near the checkout counter stood two men. One was dressed in regular business clothes, and the other was wearing some kind of plain black clerical garb. The pectoral cross should’ve been an obvious giveaway, but I was an infant, I knew nothing, and until this moment whenever I had seen the bishop he had been wearing vestments or a cassock.

Puzzled but undeterred, I nonchalantly pretended to skim the titles of books and simultaneously tried to match the mental image I had of the bishop with the person standing 15 feet away (…this sounds so much creepier in hindsight than it actually was). Then he spoke again, and I once more threw a stealthy glance in his direction, but even though nothing visually made sense, I knew that voice. I had heard that voice before: at the Rite of Election and Call to Continuing Conversion, on the intro to the diocese’s televised Sunday Mass, even occasionally on the radio.

A few steps away, paying for a book, was the shepherd of the diocese.

Whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice, as the shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice.

John 10:2-4