Saturday, September 23, 2006

Fall on good soil September 23

Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one. 1 Corinthians 15:49

And some seed fell on good soil, and when it grew, it produced fruit a hundredfold.” After saying this, he called out, “Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear.” Luke 8:8

Piety

Let us pray: God, source of all seeds and fruit and being, help us to settle on fertile soil so that our action can help ourselves and those around us to grow into children that you can truly be proud of…children who are the apple of your eye…children who hear your word and act on it. Amen.

Study
http://www.usccb.org/nab/092306.shtml

I remember a demonstration from Kindergarten. We were sent on a treasure hunt to find a little red house with no doors and no windows and a star inside. Of course, at five years old, we were clueless with the assignment. So, our teacher, Mrs. Schaad in my case, took an apple and sliced it across the middle. The core revealed a star-shaped vessel holding the seeds. It happens with a Red Delicious Apple. A Macintosh. Even a Granny Smith (although that’s a green house). Any variety, the seeds travel around inside a special suitcase waiting to star in their own unfolding drama over generations.

Through the miracle of creation, the apple exists. I have no idea what God created first – the seeds or the fruit but both are in God’s cosmic design so let’s start with the seeds. The apple seeds you find in that star are the beginning…but they don’t look anything like what they will become.

Picture a bowl full of apple seeds.

But once planted, by you, or Johnny Appleseed or someone else, the seed will germinate and grow into a great big tree that is perfect for climbing, especially if you are an eight-year-old boy and your subdivision was built on an old orchard.

Recall an apple tree from your back yard or an orchard you have visited.

Depending on the time of year, that tree can take on remarkably different countenances. From budding in the spring until the blossoms appear. Then, the soft, pink and white flowers drop off as the fruit pushes its way to the service in the fullness of its own time. After the harvest, we see a coat of beautiful red, yellow and orange leaves that paint the autumn afternoon. As these leaves drop off, the tree becomes a skeleton of bark that sometimes wears tuffs of puffy white snow that cling to every crevice and cranny of the twisting limbs.

After generations of this cycle, the tree might become a pile of firewood ready to heat your house or it might decay and become a fertilizer for more growth or the wood can become the material for a project by an artist or woodworker. But let’s concentrate on one year.

Remember the beauty of the blossoms on an apple tree in the spring.

The buds give way to bright green leaves in the springtime. Then the tasty sweet (or sour) apples appear like small green Christmas ornaments, growing in size until the late summer and early autumn when they are harvested to be eaten or made into pies, sauce, cider, and other treats.

See and taste the goodness of your favorite apple.

Inside, each one you’ll find another star-shaped sack and the next generation of seeds. When you eat the fruit (about 80 calories for one apple), the final stage of its life cycle is to turns into energy that stored until we need to call on it to fuel some activity in life – maybe even our piety, study or action.

The fullness of being. The fullness of time. The energy that fuels our live and love looks nothing like the seed that existed at the beginning of this journey.

I have often thought in error about resurrection in earthly terms. Thinking that the “resurrection of the body” meant that everybody from throughout all time would be walking around. But that can’t be.

St. Paul teaches us that “What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be but a bare kernel of wheat, perhaps, or of some other kind.” As our resurrection follows that of Jesus, even his closest friends did not recognize him on the walk to Emmaus or while fishing on the Sea of Tiberas. But in reading these stories, we can’t expect Jesus to be a resurrected human body but a living spirit. “The first man, Adam, became a living being, the last Adam a life-giving spirit.”

When we fall on fertile soil, we begin to star in our own Christian journey until we reach the fullness of our being as a living spirit.

Action

Eat an apple and think about creation and resurrection. Cut it across the middle and show the star to a young child.

How will you use the energy from that apple to serve God and your neighbor today?

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