Some years ago a women told me that she had been raised in a religious home and had been a regular church goer until she went off to college when her interest dropped so that by graduation she no longer went to church. Several years after graduation she went to spend some time with her married sister who lived near a major ski resort in the Rockies. She arrived on a Saturday evening and on Sunday her sister invited her to go to church. She went skiing instead. On one of her runs down the slopes that Sunday she hit a tree and broke her leg. She ends up several days in the hospital and a large cast on her leg. The next Sunday her sister again invites her to come to church. Since skiing is no longer an option she accepts. As luck would have it, the readings were about the Good Shepherd and there was a visiting priest from Israel there. The priest could not see her or the huge cast since she was sitting in the back pew. He began his homily: “There is a practice among shepherds in Israel, he said, that existed at the time of Jesus and is still in use today that needs to be understood in order to appreciate what Jesus says about God as the Good Shepherd. Sometimes very early on in the life of a lamb, if a shepherd senses that this particular lamb is going to be a constant stray and forever be drifting away from the herd, the shepherd deliberately breaks the lamb’s leg so that he has to carry it until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb becomes so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again.”

The woman said, “I may be dense but given my broken leg and all that chance coincidence, hearing those words woke up something inside me. I have prayed and gone to church regularly ever since.” “The language of God is the experience God writes inside our lives,” says St. John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic. What does he mean? Divine providence is a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks. What this woman experienced that Sunday was precisely the language of God, divine providence, God’s finger in her life through a conspiracy of accidents. Today the concept of divine providence is not very popular. So I want to make it clear, I’m not talking about an unhealthy fundamentalism that says God sent AIDS into the world as a punishment for sexual promiscuity and I am not talking about an unhealthy theology of God that says God sends us natural or personal disasters to bring us back to our senses. These are false notions of divine providence because God does not start fires, floods, wars, AIDS, or anything else to punish us. God does not break anyone’s legs. Mother Nature, chance happenings, freak accident and free choices, sometimes sinful, can all result in broken legs and far worse. God does not send catastrophes to wake us up.

But to say God does not cause or initiate these things is NOT the same thing as saying that God does not speak through them. God speaks through chance events, accidents, both good and bad. I knew a farm couple many years ago who understood this. They had a finely tuned and theologically correct sense of Divine providence. They were farmers and for them there were no accidents, only providence and the finger of God. If they had a good harvest, God was blessing them. If they had a poor harvest, well, they concluded that God wanted them to live on less for a while and for a good reason. And they would always in the end figure out that reason.

Jesus called this, “reading the signs of the times.” How do we do this? We do it by taking the outer experiences of our lives, what is happening to us and we ponder, we attempt to look at life through the eyes of God - what is God saying to us in the events of our lives? In the conspiracy of accidents that make up the ordinary events of our everyday lives, the finger of God is writing and writing large. We are children of Israel, children of God, children of our mothers and fathers in faith. We need to look at each and every event in our lives and ask ourselves the question: “What is God saying to us in this?” The language of God is the experience that God writes inside our lives. “I am the good shepherd, I know my sheep and my sheep know me and they will hear my voice.” The voice of God whispers in the events of our lives - prayer - the prayer of listening - not speaking words but listening allows us to hear the Shepherd’s voice. When we prayerfully contemplate the events of our lives we hear the resounding voice of God - a clear and pure voice that calls us beloved - that tells us that we are God’s children now - see what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Listen closely this week and you will hear the shepherd.