The Soil And The Seed And The Light
“…hear our prayer which we offer for all your faithful people,
that in their vocation and ministry they may serve you in holiness and truth to the glory of your name (from today’s Collect)
TODAY, WE WILL hear again Jesus’ famous parable of the sewer and the seeds, as well as a story about the early descendants (grandsons) of Abraham, to whom the three major Middle Eastern faiths trace their roots, and some Pauline teaching about flesh and spirit. We will praise God in hymns and psalm, whose word we will acclaim, “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” So how do we deal with this word? How can we approach it? How do we apprehend it, let it take root in us? How can we learn from it and move on, wiser, more in touch with God and creation, with ourselves and our fellow beings, the earth, our lives, history, more able to serve God “in holiness and truth?”
Well, to be simply asking these questions is a beginning, because to actually want to ask them is indicative of our intention. While I was praying with someone this week, focusing the prayer on some tough things going on in their life and in the lives of their loved ones, it struck me afresh that our faith is not in a God that manipulates the circumstances of our lives and makes this or that happen (this is an Ancient Grecian type of belief; I’ve said enough about that recently) but in the “ground of all being”, I AM, one true God who loves all and who gives all free choice. So, if our intention then is to exercise our free will to ask the deep questions, we are already working the soil into which the seeds of the sewer, Jesus Christ, are all the time falling.
Intention is a key to allowing the word, freely given and without coercion, to enlighten our path. This intention, once raised to our consciousness, will move us on through the layers of our existence, exposing to that which we really are, the eternal part of us, our true nature and that which is false or misguided. The word, be it embedded in our Bibles, our surroundings, the events of our lives, music, art, science…everything… will expose these things but our intention removes the veil. Each one of us is a field of good soil. But we also have places in that field which are barren, rocky and which provide easy pickings for the birds. If our intention leads us to contemplate the word openly and in truth, we will soon realise this. But as soon as we do, we begin, in the light of that same word, to till the soil.
Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin 