Saturday, July 26, 2025
Memorial of Saints Joachim and Anne, Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Weeds
Would the apostle James have been afraid of being choked by weeds as he sought the fruit of the spirit? In the first chapter of his succinct and uncompromising letter to the “twelve churches,” he accepts without condition what he has received and passes on to us as truth.
Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls.
Like Homer’s hero, James had to pass through Scylla and Charybdis – he knew that believing the word was dangerous but not believing was at least equally dangerous. But by the end, as much as any author in the scriptures, James insists that we not “doubt.”
How could he “know for sure” that what he heard and saw was from God? And how can we?
To start with we must do what we can to know what we mean by “God.” Henri Nouwen simplifies this by removing much of what passes for truth about God with one stroke:
God cannot be “caught” or “comprehended” in any specific idea, concept, opinion, or conviction. God cannot be defined by any specific emotion or spiritual sensation. God cannot be identified with good feelings, right intentions, spiritual fervor, generosity of spirit, or unconditional love. All these experiences may remind us of God’s presence, but their absence does not prove God’s absence. God is greater than our minds and greater than our hearts, and just as we have to avoid the temptation of adapting God to our finite small concepts, we have to avoid adapting God to our limited small feelings. – Henri Nouwen
With a second stroke we can remove any gnostic idea that God is only spirit (and we are not) by simply remembering this simple truth about children: “For some years, a child makes no distinction between the physical and the unseen, the literal and the mysterious.” We can return to this point of view and simplify our own seeing. Children do not see through a glass darkly; they see as if face to face. God is not an idea or simply a spirit or anything else that we must struggle to see. He’s just here, right next to me.
This observation comes from a distinguished Fordham University professor, Richard Giannone, who knows as much as any other former child about God, although he must push his big words and concepts aside to retrieve that knowing.
Finally, Jesus’ parable reminds us that God is the source of all we need, and he never runs out of himself.
The Kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man
who sowed good seed in his field.
While everyone was asleep his enemy came
and sowed weeds all through the wheat and then went off.
When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well.
The slaves of the householder came to him and said,
“Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?
Where have the weeds come from?”
He answered, “An enemy has done this.”
His slaves said to him, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?”
He replied, ”No, if you pull up the weeds
you might uproot the wheat along with them.
Let them grow together until harvest;
then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters,
“’First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning;
but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
Here I am, a tall strong-standing stalk of wheat. But one day as I’m basking in the morning sun, I notice a velvet-leaved buttonweed breaking through the soil next to me. The weed grows quickly and soon shade from its large obnoxious too-green ugly leaves is depriving me of sunlight. Then as the weed’s roots siphon off the nutrients I took for granted, I feel some weakness coming on. What should I do? Where’s that eighteen inch machete that my farmer sharpens daily?
I cock my ears toward heaven, and in an instant hear God’s voice singing clearly inside every kernel of my head. All at once a thousand echoes of his voice resound and comfort and invite me to remember that I can rest. Do not be afraid, little one. I have more than enough for you, you just wait and see. I have created yesterday, today and tomorrow. In all these days you are my child, and I love you.
God the LORD has spoken and summoned the earth,
   from the rising of the sun to its setting.
From Zion, perfect in beauty,
   God shines forth.
Is not this the God of our fathers, and the God of our children? My every kernel of wheat will learn to trust him again, as my children do, and all of us will lie down and sleep in peace.
Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls.
(Exodus 24, Psalm 50, James 1, Matthew 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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