Fr. Aidan’s sermon 11-05-2003.

So! Good Shepherd Sunday. It is a Sunday when we come to thank God for all the good shepherding we do we are all good shepherds be it parents, grandparents, perhaps single people, but I would suggest that everyone here has somebody in their care; somebody to look out for and to care for and that is what being a Good Shepherd is about. So we come to thank God for the gifts he has given us to be Good Shepherds and we have come to ask him (as it says in the first prayer of the Mass) the courage to continue that task which he gives us. It is rightly vocations weekend too, when we pray for vocations, especially to the Priesthood and the religious life.

I met somebody with a vocation the other night. I was (as busy Priests do) coming back from playing golf in Heysham, roaring down the M6 at great speed when suddenly everything went wrong in the car. I don’t know what? It’s great when you have a car of real quality like I have! So I pulled onto the hard shoulder. My mum and dad must have been looking after me because it was just near Cloughton where I was bought up, so I managed to sneak off at that forbidden road ‘no entry’ (I didn’t fancy sitting on the hard shoulder) and I got out my mobile phone and it was charged! I was amazed! It’s usually flat when I need it, so I put in a few numbers and I got the RAC and they came out and rescued me. I mean that is the first time that has ever happened. Not the first time I have been rescued (that is quite frequent), but to work a mobile phone like that, I was flabbergasted! So, anyway, this young man came along and he put my car on the back of his wagon and bought me home.

I arrived about midnight. I was chatting to him and asking him about his job and I asked,

“How long do you work“?

And he said,

“Well I work at night”.

I asked,

“When do you finish”?

And he said,

“I am working all night tonight.”

And I said,

“How many days a week do you work”?

And he said,

“Six days a week. One day off, but I am on call on my day off”.

And I said,

“Well are you married”?

“Married?” he replied, “I couldn’t get married in this job there is no time; we would never see each other”.

I said,

“Do you like the job”?

He said he would do it for half the money. He said,

“Every day is different, every call out is different”.

And I said to him,

“You are a bit like me apart from the days off. So don’t call me on a Monday. If you die don’t die on a Monday!”

But a young man with a real sense of vocation and a caring vocation and I think when you think back to the old catechist and the penny catechism. Remember the question, who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? God made me to know him, love him, serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next. And in some ways that’s the key to the whole of life and the whole of bringing up children and the whole of education in our schools and what we are about.

The whole purpose is to know God to love him and to serve him and at this time of the year for parents and for teachers it is easy to know God. To see a bluebell is to know God and to love God. I am sure all of us have memories of childhood and bluebells and at this time of year where God is bursting forth all around us it is so easy for parents and for teachers to help children, not only to know God but also to love God and to be filled with wonder at the presence of God all around us.

What perhaps what we are not so good at is the serving of God to know him and to love him and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next. And to be happy with him forever in the next means we are the people who always have an eye on eternity. So in bringing up our children we have an eye on eternity constantly and eternity is gained if you like by serving God. So we bring our children up to know that they are unique and gifted and they have gifts, a whole variety of gifts and our job is to develop them and to bring them out and the children have to know the God that is within them. They are each of them as St Paul says in that lovely phrase ‘they are God’s work of art’ and he is still doing it, so we have to help them to know and love God in themselves, in the world around them.

Why? And this is where we think a lot of our catholic schools are not catholic, in fact they are anti-catholic, because we go along with the whole thing of saying 'well you learn those gifts' and 'you develop them', why? So you can support the British economy. So that you can support the system of evil trading which goes on in the world. So you get a nice house, a nice job and nice holiday’s abroad and that is the opposite of what we are about. What we are about is trying to learn what our gifts are, to know what they are, to hold them because they are given to us by God not for ourselves but for others so that we may serve God.

So the only purpose of education at home and in school is to grow a people who will serve others, who will serve the world, will change the world. After mass today Phillipa Visity has come to talk to us about CAFOD and Ethiopia and I would say a sign of the success of St Bede’s school is if in ten years time they have got someone from St Bede’s in Ethiopia that means that it is a good catholic school, because that is serving others. So we must bring up our children to know and to understand that the gifts are given them to serve others and we must also reflect on our own lives and say it is not just because God tells us that he has given us gifts so that we can use them for others, it is because that is the key of happiness, it is in there that our deep peace of mind and joy and fullness of human life exists in being Good Shepherds.

That is what today’s Gospel is about. And I suggest if you look back over your own life you will see that the best moments when you have lived most fully, have been when you have laid down, perhaps not all of your life but, some of your life for others, when it has been a great act of love. When you have forgotten yourself and used your gifts for others because that is the key to happiness in this world and in the next and each of us have a vocation. Each of us is called by God to know our own gifts better so we may use them for others. I remember being put in my place really when I was a Chaplain at Cambridge University by a young man who was in his final year I was talking to him and I said,

“What are you going to do next year; what job are you going to do”?

And he looked at me and he said,

“Father I am trying to find out what God wants me to do with my life”!

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