My Italian grandfather was a shepherd. As a child, I envisioned myself living on a beautiful mountain minding sheep like grandpa.

Years later, I saw a movie about an Italian boy being dragged from school by his father and ushered up into the mountains to tend the family sheep. The movie taught me most stories have two sides, one glamorous and one unglamorous.

The place where the boy's sheep were grazing was above the timber line. At nighttime, temperatures dropped dramatically. With no place to escape the cold, the boy slept in a hollow ditch. Robbers would sometimes steal sheep from his herd. And there was silence, no one to talk with except the sheep.

The boy endured one cross after another, and yet he remained faithful to his duties.

Learning about this negative side of shepherding, I wondered why is Christ portrayed as a shepherd? To understand why, we need to combine it with being pictured as God's children.

When a new child is born, parents tend to experience ecstatic love, feeling no other child exists like their own.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," a wise old priest, Zosima, expounds on this ecstasy of love: "Love changes one more than knowledge. ... Love is more powerful than thought."

Zosima observes that, more than a feeling or a thought, love is concrete action. "It is as much a creation as is a poem." For the early Greeks, poetry was considered the most precious gift a person could possess. Why is it so exalted? Because it penetrates the very soul of life and unveils its true reality.

Zosima concludes, "As we advance in love, we grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of the soul."

Why do we then love the images of being children of God and shepherded by Christ? It is because they represent active love par excellence, guaranteeing our immortality gained through Christ's Death.