Reflection for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time by FAN Associate Director Sr. Marie Lucey, OSF
This reflection was originally posted in our July 6th newsletter
Jesus sat by the sea to teach with an agricultural parable. Why not? All Creation is home to him, and he likes to do the unexpected. So from a boat, he begins: “A sower went out to sow.” The parable is familiar to us, and while we acknowledge our rocky and thorny patches, we all want to be rich soil. But what the parable doesn’t describe is the consistent, patient work needed to produce abundant fruit.
Our small veggie garden is green and healthy. It has offered lettuce and arugula and will soon be more abundant. I’m not the gardener, but I know from watching that “sowing” involves more than throwing a seed on the ground. The gardener turns the soil, provides nutrients, plants seeds, fences for protection from squirrels, waters and weeds faithfully. In our spiritual gardens, Jesus is the sower, and we must hear and understand, listen and practice; i.e. do the work needed to bear fruit.
In this liturgical Ordinary Time, the circumstances in which we live and garden are anything but ordinary. Coronavirus unabated in this leaderless country; political divisions; protests against police brutality against people of color, especially Black men; a teetering economy with hardest impact (as always) on people who are poor, people of color, immigrants and refugees, disabled and elderly people–those who struggle to survive in what Pope Francis calls this “throwaway culture.” And yet– and yet– there are signs of new life sprouting. “. . . all creation is groaning,” not in despair, but “in labor pains.” Something new is trying to be born. Feel its heartbeat. See the promise in well-tended gardens. Do the work needed to have Jesus say, “But blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears because they hear.” And by implication, “your hands because they work to produce abundant fruit.”
Sr. Marie Lucey, OSF
FAN Associate Director
Acting Franciscan 
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