Reflections #106
This parable is a bit tricky. The good seed are the children of the kingdom sown by Jesus and the bad seed are the children of the evil one sown by the devil?!? We react by thinking, “aren’t we all children of God?” “Are bad people children of Satan?”
The Good News is that we are all children of God; no one is a child of the devil. However, we don’t always feel like we are. That’s why we often don’t act the part.
It’s very important in vocational awakening to recognize the defensive habits we created to cope with the feeling that God was absent. Recall that the bad seed was sown when everyone was asleep. In the Gospel being asleep means being unconscious of who you are. Since our actions mirror our consciousness it follows that a lot of us are sleep walking a lot of the time.
These weeds are Zizania or tares and are a kind of darnel and grow just as tall as wheat or barley and resemble wheat. Zizania is poisonous to people and livestock producing sleepiness, nausea, convulsions and even death. This is a powerful parallel to what unconsciousness of who we really are can do to our lives as well.
The parable considers the freedom we have to grow good or grow bad and that people are not to be edited out before death. But to grow in holiness and vocational fitness requires that we are dealing with our weeds before the end. The angels represent our awakened consciousness. Its job is “to collect out” causes of sin and throw them into the furnace.
Each of our defensive patterns is rooted and runs throughout our whole mental, emotional and physical body. When we notice a typical defensive reaction to protect us from feeling the legitimate pain and grief of life we can in faith pause and withhold our energy. This is a gentle withholding not a rigid repression. It says, “I am willing to feel what a child of God experiences when this happens.” What follows is a feeling of burning, discomfort and restlessness. The result is a weakening of our desperate compulsive habits that keep us afraid, ashamed and angrily distant from God.
This burning means that the furnace of Divine love is within. It purifies us of poison, sleepiness and what sickens. It makes us to shine like the sun through our vocation in the kingdom of our Father.
Fr. Mark Blom omi
Vocation Director OMI Lacombe Province
