
When I was newer to the pilgrimage of the spiritual life, I heard mainly one verse of this passage: the good soil. I wanted to be good soil and I wanted the seed to bring forth a hundredfold! Or more!
Now in midlife, I realize that all these various “soils” make up my soul. There are parts of my heart and my mind that I know very well. I have to admit, also, that there are other parts that are completely unknown to me. And in between there are vast expanses of my self-knowledge that are a confusing mixture of openness and resistance, longing and fear, clarity and confusion.
God loves all of my story with all of its glory and all of its messiness.
The spiritual life, it could be said, is the work of grace by which God turns the unknown resistant parts of our soul into known, open, and vulnerable spaces that we offer to Him, the interior world where the Word can take root and transform us from the inside out. We are this moving frontier between what we know of ourselves and what we shall become, through the lifting up and purification of what is still unknown.
These days, I am most grateful for the ways in which Jesus reveals to me the hardness of the rocks that prevent his Word from taking root and thriving for His glory. I am relieved when He shows me the attitudes and behaviors that choke off the possibilities of living in the life of the Trinity in its fullness. I am sorry that I have kept the Lord waiting so long as I chased after things that I thought would fill my soul, or at least my time. My heart longs to create a new solitude to keep my soul off the rocky pathway and sheltered in my Shepherd’s arms.
The hope that we can achieve complete self-knowledge once and for all, and be completely available to God’s grace, now and forever, is fiction. Everyday we are growing and changing and responding to what is developing around us. Where one day we are open, the next day we may close down defensively if a wound has been touched. All we can do is entrust ourselves to Jesus, desiring to be good soil that is responsive to the gift of His Word, and work gently to remove the stones and thorns and to shelter ourselves in His love.
He will do all the rest.
Daily Reading
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Reading I Jeremiah 17:5-8 Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the LORD….
Saint of the Day
Saint Onesimus
Saint Onesimus, a first-century slave, converted by St. Paul, later became a bishop and martyr, epitomizing redemption and faith.
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