‘Twas the day before Christmas (Eve), and all through the house . . . I realized I had done little to prepare for Christmas. Still, such is my commitment to cranking out content for The Legionnaire that I had to do some serious thinking during my morning run as to how to get it all accomplished over the course of that Saturday.  It is made extra fun for us Catholics this weekend because of Christmas Day falling on a Monday.  While I hope most of my fellow parishioners have an idea of what to do with this calendar oddity, I unfortunately suspect that there will be many who do not know that the Sunday Mass is actually separate from the Christmas Mass.  As a Vigil goer, I will be going to the Vigil on the afternoon of the 23^rd to take care of Sunday, and Midnight Mass the following night for Christmas.  What this all means is that I was looking for something short for my late Saturday morning.  Apropos, I was led to The Shepherd.

When I found The Shepherd, I did not think it was going to be a Christmas movie.  As such, I will have to be moving it up in the schedule, but this is not something about which you need to worry other than to understand that this is going to fall just outside of the season.  The film, though, opens on the Eve on a Royal Air Force (RAF) base in Germany in 1957.  Flying Officer Freddie Hook (Ben Radcliffe) is trying to speak to his family in England over a raucous holiday celebration going on in the background to tell them that he will not be able to make it home.  While this turn of events is sad for all parties, the person he is most upset about not being able to get to is his girlfriend, Lizzie (Millie Kent).  Officer Hook’s luck changes, however, when his wingman is injured in a snowball fight and is unable to fly home as he had been set to do.  Thus, Officer Hook volunteers to take his wingman’s place, meaning that he will be able to return to his family and Lizzie after all.  Officer Hook then gets into his flight suit, checks over his fighter jet on the runway, and takes off with no problems.  It is not long into his flight, just as he is getting over the North Sea, that things start to go wrong.  The first thing that fails is his compass.  After trying to make some adjustments, he toggles his radio to report the failure of his instruments.  This is when he finds that nobody is receiving his transmissions.  The situation goes from bad to worse when, as he is approaching the English coast, a bank of fog obscures any landmarks below.  The solution, apparently, is to fly in a triangular pattern and hope that his plane is picked up by friendly radar.  No help arrives, though, and he is beginning to run out of fuel.  As he is beginning to fall into despair, believing he is going to die and imagining all the things he will be missing out on with Lizzie, he hears a voice crackle over the communications.  Looking out of his cockpit, he sees a World War II-era fighter-bomber nearby.  His attempts at trying to respond are not successful, so he noses his own plane over in the hopes of getting a visual.  At the controls of the fighter-bomber is a man named Johnny Kavanagh (John Travolta), although Officer Hook will not learn this until later.  For the moment, they are able to work out a way of Officer Hook conveying his situation.  Johnny is able to guide Officer Hook’s aircraft onto a runway in England, where Officer Hook makes a successful landing.  Johnny makes one last pass before flying off into the murky night.  Officer Hook is soon picked up by Flight Lieutenant Joe Marks (Steven Mackintosh), who informs the thankful pilot that he has landed at a long disused airfield.  Flight Lieutenant Marks brings Officer Hook into the abandoned building where the young man tries to call Lizzie, but is not successful.  Instead, he has a drink and notices a picture of Johnny on the wall.  Flight Lieutenant Marks reveals that the image is of Johnny, who had been a pilot during World War II.  Johnny had been responsible for finding lost pilots in the North Sea, but had died doing so on Christmas Eve in 1943.  To his credit, Officer Hook does not panic when he learns this information.  Neither does he freak out when he goes outside at the approach of another car.  The two men have come to retrieve Officer Hook.  They are astonished that he had made it to this airstrip in this weather because it had been unoccupied since the war.  This means that Flight Lieutenant Marks had been a specter, too.  With one last look back at the building and the derelict car he had supposedly ridden in, he goes with these new arrivals who have promised to take him home.

As you may be able to judge from my synopsis, not to mention what I said in the introduction, The Shepherd is short and sweet at a little over a half hour.  It is a simple story of a man who finds himself in a dire situation and is saved.  While the movie does not explicitly make this point, it is Divine intervention that brings Officer Hook to a safe landing.  As it begins to sink in that he is likely going to have to ditch his plane in the frigid North Sea, his thoughts turn to Lizzie.  Indeed, he writes out a short letter to her apologizing for all the moments it looks like he will miss with her.  He also prays.  He asks God for a miracle, and specifically for somebody to lead him down.  Not long thereafter, Johnny appears.  These kinds of occurrences are no unheard of in Catholic history, though they are more often associated with recognized saints.  One personal anecdote comes to mind, one told to me by a parish priest where I did research while in graduate school.  The parish is Sacred Heart on the east side of Aurora, Illinois, a predominantly Mexican immigrant section of this large Chicago suburb.  There are stories of those attempting the border crossing between Mexico and the United States being led safely by St. Pio of Pietrelcina, known more familiarly as Padre Pio.  He was an Italian saint who died in 1968.  One of the miracles associated with him, even while he was alive, was the ability to bi-locate.  In laymen’s terms, that means he could be in two places at once.  While many of us have probably wished we could do the same thing, his appearances always served God’s purposes.  Because of this, there was a large devotion to Padre Pio at Sacred Heart.  Today’s film ends before we see what kind of impact these experiences have on Officer Hook, but he does seem grateful.  In many respects, this is all God asks of us.

Though I had finished my Christmas run, The Shepherd is a great Christmas movie, and it works outside of the season. Nonetheless, the title and the fact that Johnny leads Officer Hook essentially by “following yonder star,” or in this case landing lights, works well with Christmas.  Either way, it is a good watch and I recommend it, especially given its brevity.