Consider the birds of the air

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 18-23) takes us back to the parable of the sower that that we heard two Sundays ago, a story that contains several chapters within it, all full of meaning for our spiritual lives. Jesus in this passage explains one level of meaning that is embedded in the parable. The first seed falls on ground, our souls, from where it is instantly snatched away by the devil. That seed will simply never take root. The next seed does indeed take root, but the soil is rocky and unforgiving, and the shoots of new life, the new aspirations and desires of grace, cannot stand the tribulation that comes and so wither away. All that humble promise that arose when new life began is then lost in a few instants. The next seed takes root and grows well, even perhaps grows strongly, but there is a counter force in play now, an overgrowth of brambles, the attachments and lures of this world, that hold back the new life, and it is choked accordingly. The field becomes a battle ground and the life sprung from the seed yields before the enemy. Then, at last, some seed falls on good ground where no bird robs it, the roots can go deep,  and no bramble hinders its growth. Then, granted the sun of God’s joy and the rain of His grace, it springs forth and bears fruit in varying amounts.

Of course, this parable can be read as a lesson in how it is that some embrace the work of the Divine Sower and some do not. Like so many of the parables, it contains a lesson against the fantasies that some have, and indeed revive, for universal salvation. That awful reality is only another mystery that attends the freedom of the soul that not even God will transgress. Its counterbalance is of course the superabundant generosity of the Divine Sower who casts His seed with such abandon and confidence. Though three quarters of these seeds seem to be wasted, we can leave the harvest to the wisdom of God who knows all things and foresees all ends.

And yet in other ways, this parable is not merely about the drama of salvation and damnation, but also a set of lessons for those who are trying as much as they can to be the fourth kind of soil that receives the seed. We wish to be that soil in which the seed springs up and brings forth fruit. But this bringing forth, the ongoing health of these plants, is not the work of a moment only, of some fundamental choice at one point in time. A white fence post, says Chesterton, to remain a white fence post must be regularly painted. A well-tended garden to remain a well-tended garden must be thus tended regularly. And so it is that unless our soil is well tended and carefully watched over, it risks impoverishment, invasion, sterility, and fruitlessness. These are the chapters within this greater story of the work of the Divine Sower. For reasons of space and time, however, we will focus now only on the first of these challenges: the challenge of the birds.

What then are the birds of the air, the devils who come and steal the seed away from our souls? It is easy perhaps to spot the obvious ones, but the devil often appears as an angel of light. Deceit and deception are his modus operandi. We may feel we have done enough for our spiritual lives by removing or judiciously limiting distractions such as the television, the radio, or the mobile phone. Certainly, their unbridled use is not compatible with a commitment to the following of Christ, for our souls were not made to be the highways and byways of every thought and desire that the world broadcasts for our consumption.

But then, we forget that the original medium on which meaning is imprinted is our very souls. Anima est quodammodo omnia, says St Thomas: the soul is in some ways all things, for this is how it understands.  When those thieving birds from outside are identified, excluded or restricted, the battle is not yet won, for within our souls there are already many thieving birds: distractions, our inner voices and ponderings, our memories and fantasies, and all those internal forces that give echo to our past wounds, our present struggles, and our future desires. It is not only the demoniac among the tombs who has a legion within him; we all do to some degree.

***

So, how do we make peace, how do we bring about order on the streets of our minds, in the garden of our souls? We blame our internal busyness on a lack of time and space, but if we lack these things, then we must make them. Time and space cannot be multiplied outside of us, but in our hearts, they are the fruit of stillness, and stillness only takes a little time and space; only the time and space needed to relax our grip, to let go and let God, as the saying goes.

Indeed, this exclusion of the birds that steal the seed should be not so much Operation Scarecrow, as Operation Birdman. Many birds must of course be excluded but many others need to be charmed and tamed, purified of their power of distraction, so they can contribute to the life of the field, rather than ruining it. Of course, many thieving birds in us are the fruit of illicit desires, and given the wounds of original sin, there is no surprise in that. And yet other thieving birds come from wounds untended, from corners of our lives where there were historic disasters that have never been properly healed, and that have left a burden and a distortion that we are so accustomed to, we hardly know the difference between them and ourselves.

If your eye offends you, pluck it out, says the Lord, and we can do this with the thieving birds that come to us from outside. But we cannot lose our minds to save ourselves. To be delivered there so that the seeds of the Sower can grow freely, we need deep inner work, a disposition to undertake it on our side, and a willingness to let it be done unto us, under the hand of the Vine Grower who wishes us to bring forth fruit; pruned, yes, of all that is superfluous, but purified also in all those distended and distorted parts of our souls where the world, the flesh, the devil, or merely the difficult circumstances of our lives, have led us astray.

This is not the end of God’s work in us. It is not even the beginning of the end. Yet it might be the end of the beginning, a work of gentle, judicious wisdom, rather than sadistic self-persecution. We are always in the gentle hands of God, although we do not always recognise them.

To understand this from one last angle, we can reflect on a terrible moment in Chinese history - let us call it a counter-parable - the episode of the Chinese communist campaign against what they called the four pests. According to their propaganda, rats, mosquitoes, flies, and sparrows, held back the great crop potential of the Chinese fields in the 1950s, and so the Communist Party launched a campaign whose spearhead was the fight against the sparrows who were targeted by hunters, stoned by little boys and women in the fields, collected in great stinking bags of rotting corpses, and brought for a meagre bounty to the local Party headquarters. They soon learned the folly of this policy, however, as the crops now failed because of the insect population which had been previously kept back by the birds. The mismanagement of this situation contributed to the greatest famine in world history and the deaths of around 50 million people. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

The thieving birds of the air must of course be fought back; but every well-tended garden needs some semi-tame ones also, who are part of its ecology, can serve its purposes, who have their place and even their own charm, and who, properly considered, may even bring a certain beauty to the place. They only thieve the seed of the Sower because they need taming, but when they are tamed, and when we hear their music, we will realise why St August said: cantare amantis est: only the lover sings.