Winter came on fast this year, flattening electric poles and toppling cell phone towers. I was on retreat in a remote cabin with no heat or electricity. Fortunately, I found a portable generator in a utility shed. I powered up the motor and rode out the storm with hot coffee in the cup and heat for my feet.
            When the roads cleared, I returned to the parish. Within a day, my rugged-man pride melted like thawing ice, my survivor skills washed away in the slush of daily grind and office routine.
             To ease the pain of re-entry, I called a priest friend and drove to his rectory on Friday night for fraternal conversation and a craft beer. He answered the door looking tired and depleted. We decide to skip the brewery and settled, instead, for the worn chairs in his cluttered study. He offered me a Coke.
            In no time, the shop talk commenced: lack of cash flow, clergy gossip, political rancor and other dismal assessments of the human condition. Only at the end of the visit, when he handed me my coat, did my friend ask me to pray a family in his parish grieving a death by a suicide.
            I nodded my head and walked to my truck, disgusted with my self-absorption. Why had I stoked the evening full of petty complaints? Why had I not inquired about the rigors so apparent on my colleague’s face?
           On the drive home, I thought of St. Peter and the post-Resurrection scene on the lake shore. I imagined the crackle of the fire, the frying fish and the bold confrontation of the Risen Christ:
          “Peter, do you love me?”
           Normally, those words sing with mercy, but tonight, the campfire on the beach mirrors the flames in the courtyard of denial.
           “Do you love me?”
            I see myself in the cabin, self-satisfied in my self-reliance. Why do I feel most like a man when I feel that I’m in control? Why is riding out a winter storm in a forest cabin seem more satisfying than unlocking the church for morning Mass or balancing a budget or visiting the sick or preparing a homily or, more importantly, praying for a family in the throes of tragedy?
           In my grasp for control, I deny Christ.
           “Do you love me?”
           “Yes,” I mumble.
           “Then feed my flock. Tend my sheep.”
           The words throw me a memory: my brother and I shouting and waving sticks at my grandmother's flock of sheep, attempting to chase them from one pasture to another. She noticed and grew angry. Didn’t we know that sheep are not cows?
          She stomped to the barn, filled the fold of her apron with grain, then called the frightened flock. The sheep knew her voice and followed her into the adjoining pasture.
          Beyond the fence, my grandparents’ barn stood on the ridge and the memory deepened: inside that barn I had bottled hungry lambs and warmed orphaned ones in the brisk rub of burlap sacks.
          “Tend my sheep.”
          How odd, to harken back to such a distant time. Yet, how good to recall that the vocation of the priest is that of a shepherd, not a drover, and that I was called to make my stand as a man with grain in a bucket as opposed to a stick in his hand.