4 Sunday Easter, Year A, John 10:1-10

When we were children, my father would bring us to Croke Park for All-Ireland Sunday, especially if his beloved County Cork were playing in the football or hurling final. Very often, he would have a ticket for himself and another ticket to cover two of us children and sometimes three of us! Hard as it is to believe today, at that time children were very often let in with a nod and a wink. But, after the Hillsborough disaster at Sheffield in 1989, the attitude to unticketed supporters changed all around the world, including in Croke Park.

However, the changes hadn't come yet, and we would arrive at the turnstiles to get in. The trick was to jump the turnstile before the ticket operator had a chance to stop you and we became very good at that. Then, we were in! That was how we got to see Cork beat Meath in the All-Ireland football final of 1990, 11 points to 9, sitting on the steps of the Cusack Stand.

Jesus tells us today that he is the gate of the sheepfold. The language seems a bit cryptic.
If we take a moment though to reflect on it, a gate is something that we encounter on a regular basis. The turnstiles at Croke Park, the gate into the driveway of your house, the front door of the Church. In the IT where I minister during the week, we have a thing called the 'Staff Portal' which only staff members can access on the college website. The Staff Portal keeps us up to date on all that is happening in the life of the college. All websites are a 'way in' to whatever we are browsing for. We can check out what the latest fashion is, or browse for historical trivia, or indeed to buy tickets for the All-Ireland!

Gates, doors and portals are things that we are very familiar with. While there are many gates and doorways in our world, Jesus tells us that he is the gate of the sheepfold. If he is the gate, then we are the sheep. And, if we are the sheep, then we need good grazing, good pasture to sustain us and nurture us. We need that good pasture.

In the book "Alice in Wonderland", when Alice follows the white rabbit down the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a room with many locked doors of different shapes and sizes. She must make a choice. Finding a key she matches it to it's door only to find that the door is too small for her to fit through. She finds a bottle with the label "Drink Me". It makes her shrink too small to reach the key. Then she finds a cake labelled "Eat Me" which causes her to grow into a giant! She must measure out just enough of the liquid in the bottle and the cake to make herself the right size to pick up the key and fit through the right door.

Today is also the Sunday when we offer prayers especially for vocations to priesthood and the religious life. Finding our vocation in life can be a little bit like zooming down the rabbit hole like Alice. We find ourselves looking at many different doors, wondering what adventures lie beyond them for us. Many of us will try different doors only to retreat back and pick another one. As Christians we find that we don't really choose our own vocation, but rather that we discover it.

If Jesus is the gate of the sheepfold, then he is also the doorway into our deepest calling in life. And that gate is to be found in our own hearts rather than outside ourselves in some distant place. We discover that the Lord of all Life resides deep within our very self, and there God plants a dream that is beyond all our own dreaming, an idea beyond all our own imagining, a call beyond all callings, a vocation beyond all vocations.

Like Alice in the wormhole, initially we may find that we have some work to do before our true vocation seems right. And, we discover that we do not have to force ourselves to be someone else, but to radically be true to our own self. We don't have to jump the turnstiles of life to be happy. All we have to do is discover the turnstile that fits, and we can sail right through.