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This past Sunday featured one of my favorite Gospel readings: the parable of the Sower and the Seed. It didn’t used to be one of my favorite readings. For a long time, I found it a bit boring. I mean, how many times can one hear the same passage year after year and find something new in it? There is some seed, a path, birds, gravel, thorns. Finally good soil. Be good soil. What more is there to say?
But then a couple years ago, I was with a fellow itinerant preacher who does a lot more of this work than I do. He said to me, “I always pray to get sent to the hard path.” Now, no preachers talk this way. If we are going to speak somewhere, we all want to go to the fertile soil. The church where people show up for Mass on time and don’t read their bulletins. The classroom where all the students sit with rapt attention and raise their hands with lots of interesting questions. The workshop where everyone wants to participate. No one wants to share the Word of God with people on their cell phones.
“Why would you want to do that?” I asked. I’ve done this kind of presenting before. It is just slightly more fun than slamming your head against a brick wall.
“Because,” he said, “everyone wants to go to the fertile soil, but I’ve been thinking about how fertile soil comes to be. And I realize that before it was fertile soil it was rocky soil that got broken down slowly by the different kinds of thorny plants that could grow in shallow ground. And before it was the shallow rocky soil it was hard as stone where seed didn’t even grow. But the seed started there and when it was thrown, it pelted the rock and made little pings that eventually broke it into shallow rocky soil. And when the seed kept hitting that rocky soil, it got into the cracks and began to break them apart further. And over much, much, much time this was the ground that became fertile soil. It all must start somewhere.”
Patience is not my strong suit. I appreciate things that don’t take much time and have quick, efficient results. Now more so than ever before. It just isn’t clear how much time I have left and I have so many things I’d like to see grow. But this is the point in existence when one also becomes aware that the parable of the Sower and the Seed tells the story not just of how the Word of God works, but each human life—also a word from God—works. We each live life like a seed, sometimes feeling like we’ve landed on fertile soil where we can thrive and grow and produce much fruit, but lots of time hitting rocky ground, and sometimes feeling like we’ve hit a hard path and the birds are already overhead. It doesn’t seem fair. But then we remember we are not even the center of our country’s story or our church’s story, much less the center of the universe’s story…yet still have the potential to contribute to that grand story in some minute way.
I hope it is not a terrible copyright violation to share here a meditation from the Jesuit Anthony de Mello that I read a thousand years ago in my early 20’s in Kenya and was so touched by that I copied it by hand into my journal, which means I don’t even know what book to tell you to go find it in. I’ll warn you in advance it might sound a bit harsh when you first read it, but then comforting in the only way Christianity knows how to comfort. It’s called “The Kingdom” and here it is:
“I imagine that I enter a deep dark cave where I am totally alone.
I sit down in a corner to meditate on life.
Today I choose to see life in its brokenness and uselessness and waste.
“I imagine flowers growing by a roadside
And I see the seeds that never make it to the surface of the ground
The tender shoots that sprouted only to be trampled on by people
Devoured by cattle, scorched by the heat of the sun.
At every stage of growth thousands must perish for one flower that will bloom
“I see trillions of wasted eggs and fetuses destroyed and babies born to perish
For every human that survives
“I see the wasted struggles of millions who aspire to be actors,
Writers, political leaders, saints,
And end in failure
For the handful that arrives.
“I have myself arrived at where I am today
Through countless wasted hours of boredom
Useless conversations, pastimes, incapacitating sickness
Or sufferings I was fool enough to bring upon myself
Through energy I squandered on unproductive planning
Stillborn projects, fruitless undertakings.
“I contemplate the myriad opportunities I threw away,
The talents I neglected, the challenges I dared not face, the promises that never were,
And worse still, never will be kept.
“I contemplate this not with sadness, not with guilt,
But with patient understanding, for I wish to love life as much in its failure
As in its success.
“And I recall the parable the Lord gave us as a symbol of the Kingdom
The sower goes out to sow his seed
Some of it falls on rocky soil
Some among thorns and thistles
Some on the road where it is trampled on or eaten by the birds,
And some of it bears a hundredfold
Or maybe less, just thirtyfold or sixty.
“And I love the whole of that field.
I love the rock and the fertile soil
The pathway and the thorns and thistles
For all of it is part of life.
I love the seed that is sensationally fruitful
And the seed that has just average success
Today I especially love the seed that is sown only to perish
So that before it goes into oblivion
It will be blessed and redeemed by my love.
“Finally I look at the Savior on the cross,
Symbolizing in his broken body and his unsuccessful mission
The drama of life in general
And my life in particular
I love him, too,
And as I press him to my heart
I understand that somewhere, somehow,
All of it has a meaning
All of it is redeemed and made beautiful
And resurrected.”
Unlike my friend, I am not yet to the space where I can pray generously to be sent to the hard path. I admire him much for that. If you can’t already tell, he is quite holy. A little crazy, but holy. Where I am, though, is more in the space where I can accept finding myself on the hard path and believe that my life still has meaning in the big, big, big scheme of things. It doesn’t have to be highly effective and productive and visually fruitful. It might just involve pinging my head against a brick wall and trusting that what I am doing is still is worth doing. Hope this week that you are experiencing your pinging as meaningful still, too.
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Health Update: Good news! Last MRI took a little while to get the results back to us, but all seems good. No more sign of growth in tumor in the middle of my brain. Area where the glioblastoma tumor was removed seems to be filling in with… well, brain material. Obviously resulting in highly coherent and medically-sound content pouring forth from me, as evident in that last sentence. But basically things are going as well as they could go at present and I am feeling well. I credit this to your prayers which I hope will continue. My last round of chemo for the present time will be the last week of this month. Next MRI in first week of October.
Photo Credit: St. John's Bible - artists Aidan Hart with contribution from Donald Jackson and Sally Mae Joseph