The Good Shepherd

     When Father Damien in a sermon used the memorable phrase, “ We lepers,” his listeners knew that the membrane of health that had hitherto divided him from them was gone, and that he was now one of them indeed. [They began to appreciate the incarnation of the Pascal Mystery happening in their midst.] Robert Louis Stevenson and thousands of others  have been awestruck by such devotion.  A not quite comparable event might be an oncologist addressing his staff and patients by saying, “Those of us with cancer.”
         It is easy to forget that the drama of human existence arising from Original Sin is aimed at curing death.
      Among the humbling satisfactions of aging is that one realizes truths he has been uttering all along. We can know things without, for all that, realizing them. The words are there, but the meaning, the connection  has been dulled by repetition and habit. And then, surprisingly, the penny drops.  The transition from notional to real knowledge is in many senses the essence of the intellectual life. Getting to know what we already know, but for real.
       Imagine Father Damien saying, “We mortals.” Where would be the drama in that, the sense of a new companionship?   Notionally, mortality is a pretty dull fact. But it is a feature of life that certain poignant situations bring home to us its reality. It is no longer notional. What then?
       Like Damien, we go on doing what we were doing. Yet everything is different.  We are then, hopefully,  in some true and final sense,  in the arms of that Good Shepherd.    - taken from We Lepers by Ralph McInerny