In the Biblical context, if there is any word holier after ‘God’, it is ‘people’. The Old Testament is full of Yahweh’s constant concern for HIS people. “I will be your God and you will be my people”, is the kind of bond Yahweh enjoys all throughout the OT. “I have heard the cry of my people”, is the concern that never lets Yahweh sleep. God’s immense love for His people makes Him want to belong to His people. This bond and concern of God with people continues in the New Testament in the form of Jesus choosing to name his relationship with people through the ‘Shepherd and Sheep’ metaphor. The Incarnation is none else but God wanting to be close to HIS people, becoming an insider, not wanting to remain an outsider. Even when the sheep goes astray, the Shepherd anxiously goes in search of it, finds it, tenderly nurses it and brings it back to the fold. Images of the Good Shepherd adorn the walls of many Catholic homes.

Our vernacular juniorates and regional or contextual theologates work hard to prepare students qualify as pastors rooted in the soil. One of the goals of formation is to enable a Jesuit to become as much a ‘son’ of that soil as possible i.e. enabling him to represent the people’s dreams and struggles, accomplishments and aspirations, ethos and pathos; what the people were, are and are journeying towards becoming. This is what makes a pastor culturally native or relevant, not just a mere fact of being biologically born and brought up in the motherland. Many do become cultural immigrants whilst some accept their limitations of remaining cultural non-immigrants, admitting their inability to incarnate themselves into the culture and land of their pastoral constituency. The danger is in inadvertently becoming pastoral colonizers by wanting to impose one’s culture i.e. ways of thinking, sensing, feeling or worshiping on the foreign colony with a subconscious ‘highbrow’ condescension upon the local ethos. Perhaps this is what the Holy Father, our beloved Pope Francis means by now a popular phrase “the smell of the sheep”. It is by dwelling in the cultural soul of the local people that Jesuit missionaries could offer dictionaries, translations of the Bible and liturgical material and voluminous literature in the vernacular. Much of the modern day evangelization owes its success to this noble attitude of learning, more than teaching; receiving more than imposing.

If deep reverence for culture is a direct condition for pastoral ministry, a certain emotional bonding is the second one. Reverential-Emotional bonding born out of a burning passion for the pastoral land will decide, what is as termed in Arrupean parlance, “What will get you out of the bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your week-ends.” It will express itself in wanting to become a humble sharer in the lives of the people; sharing time with them to begin with. The incarnation beckons us to share with people what they are and what they have: their tears and sweat, blood and bread, joys and songs. It wants one as a pastor to be a co-pilgrim amongst a community of pilgrims.

Finally, ‘shepherding’ is also ‘leading’. Jesus’ leadership was a foot-washing leadership not just a professional or managerial leadership. The shepherd uses a variety of whistling codes that the herd follows perfectly. “I know my sheep and my sheep know me.” (John 10.14) Such fine-tuning with the people is the substratum of all commands and demands concerning people. Nelson Mandela reminisces his boyhood experience of herding cattle in an interview to TIME magazine (Mandela, His 8 Lessons of Leadership, Pg. 20, TIME, July 21, 2008): “You can only lead them from behind.” Let people be seen and the pastor be invisibly felt from behind the curtains like an Emmanuel comforting them, “I am with you”. For pastors, can anything be more encouraging than the words of St. Augustine quoted by Vatican II? : “What I am for you terrifies me; what I am with you consoles me. For you I am a bishop; but with you I am a Christian. The former is a duty; the latter a grace. The former is a danger; the latter, salvation.” (LG32)

Vinayak Jadav, SJ