Sitting with the Sacred

This Week’s Readings:

1. Isaiah 55:10–11
2. Psalm 65:10, 11, 12–13, 14
3. Romans 8:18–23
4. Matthew 13:1–23

I found myself conversing with what stood out to me in each of this week’s readings, and the conversation felt familiar. The familiarity wasn’t comfortable. It was boring, and the boredom I experienced in response to each reading was a bit anxiety-inducing.

Now that I’ve been writing this blog for a year and a half, I worry I’m the responding to these passages the same way I did the last time I wrote about each one here. And I want to receive and share new insights — for my own sake and for yours.

Nonetheless, I trust that the Spirit is working on me, in me, and through me even when I feel like I’m following the same old tracks and in doing so, may be getting stuck in the same ruts over and over.

The first reading reassures me:

my word shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it.

Isaiah 55:11

This reading suggests that at least I can’t totally stop the ability of Love’s winds from re-forming creation, I said to myself as I read this verse. I can only force these Winds to choose a different tunnel. Yet when I interrupt their course, I miss out on being enlivened by them — maybe more often than I don’t miss out on this gift.

Fortunately, for me, God, I want to be the dirt in the second stanza of this week’s psalm, and I suppose I am. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. The stanza speaks to God as follows:

Thus have you prepared the land: drenching its furrows,
breaking up its clods,
softening it with showers,
blessing its yield.

Psalm 65:11

The question for me is, will I appreciate what it takes to break up or to avoid the unhelpful knots in my life, what the psalm characterizes as clods of dirt? Will I appreciate what it takes to soften what has hardened within me so that it can yield growth? Often not, because spiritual clods and hardness, like muscular hardness, develop over time and in uncomfortable, sometimes extreme conditions. Going through the softening process is no different. This process might mean taking a pounding, like meat that needs tenderizing. It definitely means experiencing rebirth and changing my world.

The concept of rebirth sounds nice. It sounds like a sudden shift, something that happens in between blinks, but the third reading’s characterization of the process provides a reality check. It says:

We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

Romans 18:22-23

This excerpt tells me that spiritual restoration is a process, a laborious and often painful one. It also tells me that I’m undergoing the process here and now, but I will also be undergoing it, in what, to me, is the future. To God, everything is happening now and all at once in a way I can’t comprehend.

Because I can’t comprehend not being bound by time, in the reading from Matthew, Jesus uses a parable to compare the process of spiritual growth to the process by which a crop grows — or doesn’t.

In the reading, Jesus gives an interpretation of the parable, and I’m grappling with how to apply this parable and its interpretation my life. I know that, to grow, a seed needs a certain depth of soil that isn’t too rocky for the plant to put down roots. It also needs room to grow. To me, this means the seed that is me needs a deep trust in God to grow. Having such trust would keep the often difficult conditions of life from stunting my growth. Reaching out to God in the midst of difficulties just might transform them from obstacles to opportunities. Spiritual fertilizers, I might call these experiences.

For me, the weeds in the parable are the distractions that take up time I could be using to love God, myself, and others as God loves me. Sometimes these distractions are unpleasant. They feel like the anxieties Jesus says the weeds represent. Other times, they’re harder recognize as weeds because they’re activities I enjoy and use to forget about feelings I don’t want to feel and to put off doing what I don’t want to do.

It’s useful for me to distract myself sometimes, to break myself out of a pattern of unhelpful thinking, a pattern of replaying unpleasant past experiences or of dreading a future experience that I anticipate will be difficult. But there are questions I know I’d benefit from asking myself about my favorite distractions:

• How often am I turning to these distractions?
• How long do the benefits I get from these activities last, and how satisfying are they? Can I do them in moderation, or do they leave me only wanting more?
• How much time are these enjoyable activities taking away from activities that have longer-lasting benefits for me and others?
• What activities with longer-lasting and broader benefits could I use instead to break myself out of unhelpful thinking? (For the record, no, memorizing comforting or inspiring Bible verses hasn’t served this purpose for me, though I’ve tried this approach and won’t rule out trying it again. Getting outside and/or getting exercise have helped.)
• What do I want to avoid dealing with, and how much better have I felt in the past when I dealt with whatever I didn’t want to rather than distracting myself from it?

Lord, open the ears of my heart and mind to hear and listen to Your answers to these questions. Thank You for hearing me. Amen.

Work cited

Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc. “Sunday 16 July 2023: Readings at Mass.” The New American Bible, 2001. Universalis for Windows, Version 2.180, Universalis Publishing Ltd., 29 June 2023, https://universalis.com/n-app-windows.htm.