A seedy business

Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 18-23) tells us how Jesus understands His own parable of the sower who went to sow his seed. Yet even this explanation does not exhaust the layers of meaning within it. The parable may apply in different ways to those who, it could be argued, have welcomed the seed and in whom the seed has yielded a harvest. Who among us has fully integrated the seed into our lives?

How do we hear the word of God without understanding? We do so by separating understanding of the faith from our devotions or our spiritual journey. This is arguably an even greater danger for those who have heard God’s call to intimacy and try to respond to it with more or less vigour. St Teresa of Avila preferred a learned spiritual director to a holy one; just think about that for a second. It means she was aware that mystical experience could be misleading without the compass points of the creed in all its depth and richness. In the inner life, while intimate knowledge of God comes through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, our normal progress is a life lived through faith in the mysteries and of the mysteries. Doxa (praise) and doctrine are not opposite poles, but oxen yolked together. Faith is not just conviction but conviction about something. To think of faith only as a conviction of the heart or an engagement of the will is to hear the word of God without understanding. Here, we must become literally disciples: i.e. those who learn.

The second class of people in the sower’s parable can also show themselves among the devout. They receive the seed with joy but fall away when adversity comes. If the first class of the devout suffer from lack of knowledge of the mysteries, might we say that the second class of the devout suffer from lack of self-knowledge? That and perhaps also radicality: self-knowledge because perhaps they thought quite wrongly that their initial joy in the word was proof of the depth of their discipleship; and radicality, because that discipleship requires precisely something much deeper, a greater depth of self-surrender than their current levels of maturity and self-awareness allow for. Did we think we were grown up because people address us as mister and misses?

Even the third class of people in the sower’s parable might be found among the devout in whom the worries of this world and the lure of riches choke the word. For the worries of the world are not just tangible, material goods from which it might be easier in some ways to hold oneself aloof. The worries of the world can be the simple but subtle attachments that we have, for example, to how we are perceived or valued; or our belief that we deserve perhaps some grander task than the one we have ended up with. Yet this kind of fretting is also a blind spot obscuring the fact that our value and dignity in God’s eyes do not come about from what we achieve. Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire, says St Catherine of Sienna. If the world is not ablaze then, it is not because we have materially failed, and certainly not because people have failed to recognise how wonderful we disciples of Christ really are. It is because somehow, somewhere, in some subtle way we have damned up the graces that would flow out of us were we to be faithful.

But, we say, we have not gone in for the lure of riches! Look at our sacrifices! Well, that depends. Perhaps if we collect devotions and spiritual milk-bottle tops like the young now collect tattoos, we do choke ourselves with the lure of riches – riches that do not become a part of our life but lie on the surface and clutter our souls, like our unused kitchen gadgets or, heaven help us, our unread books.

Happily, our lives are a journey, not a fine art. In knowledge of God and knowledge of self, coupled with detachment, the seed of His word might produce more fruit in us yet.