“Here’s Your Sign”-Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent-LECTIO DIVINA

1. LECTIO — “Here’s Your Sign” in the Scriptures

Today Isaiah speaks like a man trumpeting the sunrise:

“Comfort, give comfort…
A voice cries out: Prepare the way of the Lord!”

Mountains shall flatten, valleys shall rise, the very landscape rearranging itself to make a royal highway for God. If ever there were a cosmic billboard flashing HERE’S YOUR SIGN, it is Isaiah’s vision of the Lord feeding His flock, gathering lambs in His arms, and leveling the world so that nothing stands between God and His children.

Then Our Lord in the Gospel gives the sign in miniature:

A single wandering sheep, foolish but beloved.
A shepherd who leaves ninety-nine respectable, rule-keeping parishioners on the hillside.
A joy so great in recovering the lost that the whole logic of numbers collapses.

Isaiah cries, “Here comes your God!”
Jesus replies, “Here is your God—He is carrying the lost home on His shoulders.”

And I—Chestertonian wanderer that I am—find the two voices harmonizing into one thunderous truth:

The sign of God is always the same:
He goes after the ones we’d rather forget.

“Their homes became oases of dignity where no one was excluded.”

Dilexi te, §51

2. MEDITATIO — The Fallen Banner and the Wandering Lambs

Yesterday, on my way to Mass, I passed a banner that only a day earlier had stood triumphantly outside St. Mary’s Cathedral, proclaiming our Centennial like a trumpet. Now the great proclamation sagged on the ground—crumpled, tangled, defeated—an accidental parody of its own glory.

Then, tending my flock later, I discovered newborn lambs—alive, fragile, and hilariously confused. Some bolted toward the Livestock Guardian Dog puppies as if these boisterous creatures were their mothers. So I gathered them gently and returned them to the ewe they had forgotten.

And because I am Catholic—because sacramental imagination runs deeper in me than blood—I recognized that these were not coincidences at all, but messages in the language God prefers: signs.

“If Boston is the fault line of the child sexual-abuse scandal that has convulsed the Roman Catholic Church, then few places have felt the aftershocks more deeply than the Diocese of Amarillo.”

New York Times
August 24, 2002

The fallen banner whispered:

“This is what your Centennial becomes
if you do not care for the little ones—
the wounded, the forgotten,
the victims scattered by clerical abuse.”

And the lambs who wandered toward the puppies showed me:

“The confused will cling to anything
if the shepherd fails to act.”

If ever there were a divine billboard pointing to our diocesan crisis,
HERE’S YOUR SIGN.

3. CONTEMPLATIO — Chestertonian Synthesis: The Paradox of a God Who Shouts With Small Things

I sit now with this paradox that only the Catholic imagination could hold without shattering:

The Almighty levels mountains,
yet speaks through a fallen banner snagged in the wind.

He thunders from Isaiah,
yet reveals His will through two lambs
running headlong toward the wrong mother.

Only a God of infinite comedy and compassion
could hide His warnings in so humble a key.

The world demands grand signs,
but God gives us small signs,
because small things are what save us.

And I, like a lumbering Chesterton character with mismatched boots, must admit:

The greatest signs are not written in stars
but in the little tragedies we step over on the way to Mass.

Perhaps the whole world is crying,
“Prepare the way, prepare the way!”
and we are too busy adjusting banners
to notice the sheep wandering off the hillside.

4. ORATIO — Prayer

5. ACTIO — Action (Laudato si’ + Synodality)

“Once more we see that “realities are more important than ideas.”

(LS 110)

Today I will:

Attend to the real, concrete suffering of the “lost sheep” in our diocese—especially survivors of clergy abuse—by naming their wounds in synodal dialogue and insisting that our Centennial celebration reflect truth, not sentimentality.

I will not let fallen banners speak louder than the Gospel.

🎵 “Signs” — Five Man Electrical Band

My Story

• Bishop Matthiesen, who rode the white horse of public activism even as he brought abusive priests into our diocese such as John Salazar—wounds that still mark us today. I spoke with him often, pleading with him to reconsider his “no regrets” about bringing those priests here…
• Bishop Yanta, who sought to enforce the Dallas Charter even when Bishop Matthiesen resisted him, and who bore the personal and pastoral cost of doing so. I met with Bishop Yanta about Bishop Matthiessen’s “no regrets” stance. He listened. He believed me. He acted where he could. And when he retired, he urged me—quietly but firmly—to keep speaking out.
• Bishop Zurek, who told the Diocese of Amarillo he had “no facts” about the Philadelphia report even as Amarillo’s connection to that tragedy was headline news. When I continued to speak out, as Bishop Yanta had once urged me to do, he later wrote that I was not among the faithful and loyal disciples whom the Lord Jesus desires.