“Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you… I glorified you on earth by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do. Now glorify me, Father, with you, with the glory that I had with you before the world began… and I have been glorified in them.”
— John 17:1–10
This is the great High Priestly Prayer, where Christ speaks not merely as teacher but as intercessor. The disciples seem almost to overhear heaven itself. And the strange thing about the prayer is that glory, in the mouth of Jesus, sounds remarkably unlike worldly success. The glory of Christ is not applause, conquest, or comfort. It is obedience completed. It is love carried through suffering. It is finishing the work the Father gave Him to do.
2. Meditatio
My friend with his new LGD
I am writing this while in Missouri delivering an LGD to the farm of a lifelong friend whose story has become strangely woven together with my own by the invisible threads of grace.
We first met as boys at St. Mary’s School in Amarillo, and later crossed paths again at Texas A&M. There, through the Newman Group at St. Mary’s Catholic Center, we built friendships and shared a Catholic world filled with theology, late-night conversations, uncertainty about the future, and the sort of youthful certainty that one is destined to do something magnificent.
Neither of us, as it turns out, ended up doing what we originally went to Texas A&M to become. He originally was going to study Parks & Wildlife Management. I intended to become a veterinarian. Yet Providence, with its peculiar Chestertonian humor, took us both somewhere far older and simpler than our degrees imagined.
He married one of our Newman Group friends and went away into the corporate world and large cities and eventually found himself returning to the land, raising livestock on rolling green Missouri pastureland a few hours commute from St. Louis. I returned to Amarillo, married a hometown girl, became a teacher, and somehow found myself becoming a pastoralist upon the dry brown plains surrounding The Glenn.
His fields are lush and green. Mine are often brown and sparse, surviving partly because of open grazing arrangements with neighbors. Yet despite the difference in landscapes, there is something profoundly similar in our lives. We both ended up doing what Father Abraham did: tending flocks, watching weather, worrying over animals, depending upon providence, and trying in our stumbling way to glorify God through ordinary labor.
And perhaps that is the great secret hidden inside today’s Gospel. Glory is not becoming what I once imagined myself to be. Glory is accomplishing the work God actually gave me to do.
Modern men often imagine glory as self-invention. Christ speaks of glory as obedience. The world says glory means creating oneself. Christianity says glory means receiving oneself from God.
As I sit here among Missouri hills and sheepdogs and old friendships resurrected after decades of silence, I realize that perhaps the glory of God is often hidden inside lives that seem, from the outside, gloriously ordinary.
The saints and shepherds alike rarely know they are glorious. They are too busy feeding sheep.
3. Oratio
Father, glorify Yourself in my small and ordinary life.
When I envy other roads, remind me that holiness is not found in the greatness of the work, but in the love with which it is done.
Thank You for old friendships that survive decades like buried seeds waiting for rain.
Teach me to glorify You not by chasing greatness, but by faithfully tending the flock You have entrusted to me.
And when my plans fail, help me remember that Your providence writes straighter lines than my ambitions ever could.
Chesterton delighted in the paradox that the most glorious things in the world are usually the least glamorous. A mother washing dishes, a farmer mending fence, a priest saying Mass, a shepherd checking water lines at dusk—these acts appear painfully ordinary to modern eyes precisely because modernity has lost the ability to recognize glory.
Christ reveals that glory is not the escape from sacrifice but its transfiguration.
The Cross itself is called glorification in John’s Gospel. That is madness by worldly standards. Yet Christianity forever insists that the man nailed to wood is more glorious than Caesar seated upon gold.
I think of Abraham wandering with flocks beneath strange stars, never fully possessing the land promised him. His glory was not achievement but faithfulness. So too with my friend and me. We once imagined careers of prestige and certainty. Instead we became, in different ways, caretakers of land and animals and souls.
And perhaps that is precisely the joke God was telling all along.
For in the Kingdom of Heaven, glory often smells less like perfume and more like sheep.
5. Actio — In Light of Laudato Si’ and Synodality
The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.
In the Church specifically, the Christian family is called to take an active part in ecclesial life and pastoral action, fully living out its vocation and mission, which has an ecological dimension: “The family is thus an agent of pastoral activity through its explicit proclamation of the Gospel and its legacy of varied forms of witness, namely solidarity with the poor, openness to a diversity of people, the protection of creation, moral and material solidarity with other families, including those most in need, commitment to the promotion of the common good and the transformation of unjust social structures, beginning in the territory in which the family lives, through the practice of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy” (AL 290). By including “the protection of creation” in this list of various forms of witness, Pope Francis signals that the “domestic Church”, no less than any other Church body or organization, is also called to an “ecological conversion.” The family can be a faithful and effective channel for God’s children to cooperate in caring for our common home.
Pope Francis reminds us in Laudato Si’ that authentic human fulfillment comes not from domination but from right relationship—with God, with creation, and with one another.
Action:
Today I will consciously honor one “ordinary” task as holy work rather than mere labor. Whether feeding animals, driving long miles, repairing equipment, or listening to an old friend, I will treat the task not as interruption but as participation in God’s ongoing creation.
Synodality reminds me that holiness is walked together. Even decades of silence cannot erase friendships rooted in Christ.
A song about nostalgia, old friendships, and the strange comedy of time. Yet the Christian twist is this: glory days are not merely behind us. In Christ, even aging friendships and weathered callings can still become occasions of grace.
A film revealing that true glory is not found in power or recognition, but in sacrificial courage and fidelity to a higher calling. The deepest glory often appears where the world least expects to find it.
8. Poetic Verse
I once thought glory meant becoming extraordinary.
Now I suspect it means feeding sheep well, loving old friends faithfully, and finishing the work God actually gave me to do.
