Luke 2:8 Meaning There Were Shepherds in the Same Country

Night is the state of a man who has not yet awakened, asleep to who he is, and the field is this world of experience. The shepherds keeping watch are your own faculties held steady in the dark, the disciplined attention that guards its flock of thoughts and feelings and will not let them scatter. They watch by night because the birth always comes to those still in the sleep of ordinary life, not to the already enlightened.

This is the hour before God is born in a man. Scripture is your own autobiography, and the babe soon announced is the sign that God has begun to wake within you, expanding out of the contraction of being merely human. The watching is the whole of it. The one who keeps his attention on the wish fulfilled through the long night is the shepherd to whom the new life is shown.

The shepherds are the watching awareness in a person, the part that stands guard over the moving thoughts, and the flock is the herd of thoughts itself, wandering and needing to be kept. To abide in the field is to hold the ground of the mind, and to keep watch by night is the very act of meditation, the steady attention held while the darkness of the unlit mind presses in.

This nightwatch is where the inner birth becomes possible. When the watching self stays alert over its own thoughts, unruly as they are, stillness gathers in the dark and something new can be born within. The scene is not a hillside in the old country but the daily discipline of guarding the mind so the light can rise inside it.

Shepherds: the watching awareness in a person that guards over the wandering thoughts Field: the world of the mind, the ground where thoughts graze Flock: the herd of one's own thoughts, moving and needing to be kept Night: the unlit mind, the darkness through which meditation keeps its watch

The most important birth in the story is announced first to men on the night shift, watching sheep in a cold field. The good that saves arrives at the very moment a false god has enthroned itself in the tyrannical state, and it does not appear in the palace. It emerges in vulnerability and lowliness, among people with no rank, because that is where it can be received without being swallowed by power.

The shepherds keep watch. They are attending, awake in the dark while others sleep, and so they are the ones ready to hear. Salvation reaches the lowest first, which means it reaches everyone. What matters most does not descend through the machinery of might. It comes to a field at night, to the poor, and asks only that someone be paying attention.