Who Will Rescue the Lost Sheep
of the Lonely Revolution?
Forgive me, Lord, if I use your words for an admonitory parable. You said to the Pharisees, “What man among you, having a hundred sheep, and learning that one of them has wandered into the wilderness, will not leave the ninety nine and go after the lost sheep? And when he has found it, will he not call his friends and say, Rejoice with me, for I have found the sheep that was lost?”
That is why you came among us, to call sinners back to the fold. Not to pet and stroke them for being sinners, because that is what you mean by “lost,” and what you mean by “dead,” when you asked us to consider the young man who had wandered into the far country. The father in your parable wanted his son alive, not dead. The son said, “Father, I have sinned before heaven and you. Now I am not worthy to be called your son.” He spoke but the truth, and that truth set him free.
So I am looking at a world in a shambles. We do not have Pharisees who preen themselves for having followed the letter of the law and missed its soul. We have Pharisees who preen themselves for disobeying the law, even the most serious admonitions of the law, even your own clear words on marriage and divorce, while presuming to have discovered a soul-of-the-law whose existence has eluded two thousand years of martyrs, saints, popes, bishops, and theologians. “I thank you, O God, that you have made me a sinner and a publican, and not like these others who set their aim so high.”
In this world that I see, there is no sheepfold left. “What man among you, having a hundred sheep, and seeing the fold smashed and hirelings among the flocks, men who, while wolves are tearing the bellies of the sheep, are themselves roasting mutton on spits, will not leave the ninety nine and go into the wilderness to find one, and when he finds it dead already, will not hold his head high and say, Well, I did my best!”
It will be said that the one—the unrepentant or semi-repentant sinner, the one who wants to have the faith on his own terms—is “marginalized,” a word I detest, but which may serve my purposes this once. If adults in immoral sexual relationships are “marginalized,” Lord, let me speak up now for people who do not even make it to the margins, for the poorest of the poor, for people who have no advocate at all.
Let me speak for the children of divorce, who see their homes torn in two, because of a mother or a father who has shrugged away the vow of permanence. I see them straining to put a fine face on it, to protect the very parents who should have protected them, to squelch back their own tears so as not to hurt those who have hurt them. Who speaks for them, harried from pillar to post? Who pleads their case, whose parents conveniently assume that their children’s happiness must depend upon their own contentment, and not the other way around? Where is my Church’s apostolate for the children sawn in half, while the Solomons of our time looked the other way?
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