15th Sunday or Ordinary Time

A Homily for the 15 ^th Week in Ordinary Time
Based on Matthew 13:1-23
 
For a long time now I’ve wanted a garden. 
To dirty my hands in the cool earth, and get in a rhythm of maintaining my own little section of God's creation.
Do you garden? I respect all those who do this hard, good work.


Whenever I'm driving on 5 Mile Line Road between here and Webster, I always try to look off to the right and see if anyone's tending that little community garden just past Atlantic Road, near Rothfuss Park. I love seeing the scarecrow, try to note how the plants are thriving and being maintained, with their tilled soil, their removed rocks, all done with loving care.
 
I tried to have a garden at the rectory, but it didn't go so well. 
My little oregano plant never made it out of the pot and into the soil before it was scorched by the sun. I never got around to planting the many packets of seeds I had bought, including my favorite: beets.

This year it was going to be blackberries. I bought two saplings and was excited to plant them. I was willing to wait a number of years for their precious juicy fruits.
The day I purchased the blackberry saplings I was running some errands on a very hot day. Not wanting the plants to suffocate in the car in the early summer’s heat, I laid them carefully outside my car, thinking they'd be safe in this part of town. Wouldn't you know it: they were gone when I returned! Hopefully some good Samaritan gardener took them, knowing that anyone foolish enough to leave blackberry saplings outside a sizzling car on a hot day was probably not going to succeed maintaining when they got home.
 
Gardening, tilling the soil, and the constant maintenance that is required is something that one must choose to do. If you want the desired fruit, it will require ongoing care.
 
Jesus spoke of soil and ongoing maintenance of what we might call God’s garden in today’s parable. We hear the parable and consider:
 
How is it going with the soil of our souls? Where are we at with that interior garden of the soul that God's planted deep within us and invites us to maintain?
 
Every human being has a soul. You do, and so do I. Our souls don't have a physical location...you won't find it just to the left of the heart, or deep in our guts as the ancient Greeks believed. Our Catholic faith teaches us that the soul is the form of the body, meaning that the primary principle for our nourishment, sensation, and movement starts with the soul. At the moment of our conception, our souls were created by God and united to our precious bodies. This unity of soul with body remains until our earthly death. One day at the end of all things, we will receive our bodies back. In that in-between time after our bodily death, our souls go to God, for judgment and take their place in hell or in heaven, perhaps entering heaven after a period of purification.
 
Our souls are important. Eternally important. And yet in my experience, and maybe yours too, is that it's very easy to forget about the soul all together. Little in the media or in popular culture reminds us of the need to care for and maintain our soul, or to inspect the soil (so to speak) that is surrounding it. Practically speaking, souls are in a realm of quasi-reality for our modern culture. If you believe you have a soul, that's fine, and that’s true for you. But if you choose to believe otherwise, don't worry about it, just have fun, get more stuff, and remember: you only live once so make the most of it, even if it means being selfish. Maybe you’ve heard these spoken or unspoken messages in our society today?
 
We usually don’t go very long without eating. Our stomach reminds us to eat, and so we do.
And under usual circumstances we wouldn’t go long without showering or grooming or other care of my body which we generally maintained through sleep and exercise.
Naturally it seems right to maintain my body in these ways, even to invest time and energy to do so.
We all do the same with our cars and electronic devices. We fill up cars with gas or they won't go. We charge up a device or they run out of power and can't function. Regular, ongoing maintenance is essential in life.
 
But the same routine maintenance of the soul is often much harder to keep up. Prayer can often be a last resort, a spare-tire so to speak. This was my mode of life for my childhood and teenage years. I gave the needs and cares of my body top priority, and only considered or curated the soul in exceptional circumstances. Most of the time I lived as if I had no soul at all. In this mode of living I became bored, listless, directionless, purposeless. Did you ever have a period like this in your life, too? St. Jose Maria Escriva reminds us that a person in that state is bored and confused because they've kept their soul asleep, even if their body is awake. Their hearts grow dull, as if they were grossly out of sync with reality. They see but don't see, hear but don't hear, go through life in a daze, a type of non-spiritual auto-pilot. The reality is that God loves them deeply and has a plan for their thriving, for their being a very happy saint. But they are oblivious, and even forget God.
 
Jesus has something much better for us. He's constantly planting the Word of God, a word of Truth and a Word of Encouragement within our souls. The image of the Gospel, Matthew's 13th chapter, has Jesus teaching the people about God's Kingdom, the marvelous garden of Christian souls that He's cultivating and in which He invites us to be cooperators. So many people are hungry, their souls yearning for something more than just earthly food and drink that they crowd around him in a wild throng. Jesus, not wanting to be overcome by the crowds, moves from the beach into a boat and addresses the crowds on the shore. He stands literally broadcasting, throwing the seeds of God's Kingdom to all who will hear, irrigating their souls and the soil that surrounds them with the heavenly dew that is His Good, Good Word: a word that we are loved by God. We matter to God. We delight God as we respond to Him. We are waited for, yearned for, remembered by our loving God. And Jesus shares this good word to all who will hear.
 
Some cannot hear because they do not understand. It is as if the devil, represented in the parable by a bird comes and snatches the seed that is God’s word from the soil of their souls. I’ve seen this happen. The devil is real, and he wants to steal our joy, keep us afraid, uproot God's Good Word from our souls, and leave us empty. He’ll tempt us to put our souls back to sleep, just go with the flow, and forget, even to forget about God.
 
Some cannot hear God's word because they don't have deep roots. In these cases, the rocks of sin and the boulders that are scars from traumatic experiences suffocate our souls. They crowd the soil that surrounds our souls and leave only room for a superficial faith. The trials of life come and we feel abandoned by God because our souls are not cultivated, not deeply open to the roots of change, a change for the better, for healing, for strength and encouragement, a belief that God would have for us. These persecutions or periods of intense stress can make us forget God, and forget that our souls matter, even if it means sacrificing much for the sake of these souls.
 
Finally, sometimes we are oblivious to God, or live as if He's not real because we are so busy and preoccupied. Jesus warns us of the worldly anxieties and the lure of riches that can spoil the soil of our souls and choke up any spiritual growth as a piercing thorn would poke and pummel a precious and delicate plant. This is where things get very difficult, and ongoing spiritual maintenance becomes most important, even mandatory if we are to thrive. Everyday work, chores at home, sports, entertainment, notifications on our phones or devices, and the like vie for our attention each day. Each moment is a veritable battle for our attention. And if we are not careful, the reality of our own souls, the need to maintain them and care for them lovingly, fades into oblivion.
 
Again we are reminded that Jesus has a better way for us. In His Church, this great family of all the baptized, He shows us how to care for the soil of our soul, to cultivate it with loving care.
 
Imagine this: if we each have souls, which with God’s help we can maintain to grow in spiritual maturity and fruit, then each of us is like a little plot in a community garden, a local community here in Penfield, and yet united in a real and profound way with the wider community of God's Church all around the world, and with those in heaven or on the way to heaven in purgatory. We all have souls, eternal souls, and thus are members of this great collective garden. Here in this grand garden we can look to the sign of the cross, the sign of our salvation to scare away the devil, and protect us from his crow-like mockery and sinister designs. We care for that little spot of soil around our souls, maintaining God's garden, doing what we can in the midst of busy lives. And as we do so, those around us are blessed. The weeds that might take root in us and spread to those who surround us are eliminated through routine spiritual maintenance. We help each other when we care for the soil of our soul, even as we are individually blessed.
 
This is why weekly Mass is so important, even mandatory if our souls are to thrive. Weeds pop up in a few days. By the end of a week, they crowd out the good fruit that God is trying to grow within us. At the start of every Mass we come before the Lord to worship and be forgiven of all venial sins, those everyday weeds that block God's grace from flourishing in our souls. And then we are nourished with God's life-giving Word, like a spiritual shower from the heavens as mentioned in our first reading. This word of God trickles into the roots of our soil, opening up our soul to be ready for God's greatest gift. This marvelous and greatest gift is the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, present in what appears to be mere bread and wine. Jesus is our nourishment, the Miracle-Grow for the Garden that is our soul, sprucing up our soil, and making it fertile and fruitful.
 
Weekly Mass is the number one way to maintain the garden of our souls, not an option, but a wonderful and necessary invitation. If we’re traveling or away from our normal routines, websites and apps like Mass Times.Org or Mass Times for Traveling Catholics help us find a convenient Mass even in a new area. Beyond that, there are other ways to increase the yield of our spiritual garden:
 
If we took out a gardening magazine, the authors would give concrete tips how to cultivate and maintain the best fruit of the soil. The same can be said of the soul.
We must deal with the rocks, any grave sin, don't just try to hide, bring to the light of god's mercy and forgiveness in Sacrament of Reconciliation, or seek counsel from a trusted spiritual guide.
 
Please pray daily, even if just an Our Father or a few Hail Mary's before bed to start. 10 minutes of quiet prayer with Bible, or silence, or by dinner-table conversation about where God was in your day. These coupled with weekly Mass will help us yield thirty or sixty or 100 times the spiritual fruit.

Our lives change when our habits change, says Matthew Kelly. Pick one habit to try to form this week, and watch how it will change your life for the better. Blessing your soul, and cultivating your little section of the great garden that is God's Church. You can be a part of the truest, most reliable source of hope and happiness in our world today, the soul-seeking saints of God in training that is us, His Church. And all it takes to experience this deeply is ongoing, routine spiritual maintenance, care for the soil of our souls.