In the summer of 2000, I was newly unemployed and seeking direction for the days ahead. My spiritual director suggested an 8-day retreat to help me see more clearly where I was standing, and how I might step into the coming days. So I went off for an 8-day directed retreat (after the fact I learned it was a retreat with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola), during which I met daily with my spiritual director. She provided me with scripture and material for reflection (from the Spiritual Exercises). I spent the days praying and meditating, then talking with her about my experience of prayer.
It must have been obvious to her that I had my life-plan mapped out. Though jobless, I had already decided there was a certain kind of person I wanted to be and a certain kind of work I wanted to do in order to be that person.
Early in the week, she handed me this parable, instructing me to pray with it for the next 24 hours.
Jesus also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”
(Mark 4:26 - 29)
Of course, I had read the parable before, in fact many times through the years. But its meaning had never been so clear. I was reading these words from a different place, and hearing them as if for the first time. The seed grows, whether the farmer is asleep or awake. The seed grows, not dependent on the farmer to know how it happens or to control the outcome. The seed grows, and the end result is out of the farmer's control.
Perhaps I could have reacted to this new revelation with dismay, but I did not. Rather, a flood of relief fell over me, a lightness of being I had never experienced. My life is not about how well I control it, how well I manage my surroundings and my situation, how well I manipulate the environment in order to get the outcomes I prefer.
Most humans are controllers. If there is a scale, I probably rate higher than average on the control-meter. I cannot say I was forever changed by this moment in the summer of 2000. It was a beginning point, but these 18 years later I'm still working out what this means for me, how to enter each day without squeezing the life out of it, how to go with the flow, how to surrender my tendency to manage people and things toward my desired wishes.
The spiritual life is, by definition, an endeavor of God's Spirit. Human knowledge and understanding are not the cornerstones of the spiritual journey. To be sure, you and I are invited into this life of connection with God which makes a difference in who we are with God, self, others, and the world. We are participants, and our intention to set ourselves to the journey is crucial. But according to the parable, we are not the final determiners of the harvest.
In fact, much of the growth of God's kingdom within us happens when we are in the darkness, when we are asleep, unconscious, unaware. I've come to believe this is so because for many of us, literal sleep is the only time we have our hands off the remote control, the only time we are not managing our world. We lay our defenses down and go to sleep . . . for a few hours giving God's Spirit an opening into our well-defended life.
[I've heard entrepreneurs and other people considered "highly successful" by society talk about how little they sleep at night because they are driven to be successful. Society at large applauds that ambitious drive. I wonder, though, if some of their sleeplessness is simply the fear of taking their hand off life's remote control, even to sleep . . . the anxiety that something may happen while they are asleep that they cannot manage or manipulate . . . so their fear masquerades as the drive to succeed!)
Through the years, some people have said to me this is why they will not participate in a silent retreat . . . because they would have to lay aside their newspaper, put away their cell phone, and be out of touch for a few hours. One person actually said to me, "What if something happened in the world while I was on retreat, and I knew nothing about it?!" It was impossible for her to imagine being out of control and out of "the know", even for a few hours.
In the landscape of the parable, Jesus describes a farmer who scattered and tended the seed, but who both slept and stayed awake, and who experienced that the growth of the seed did not depend on his efforts, nor on her understanding. It is a wonderful little parable, and a marvelously clear image of how spiritual growth and fruitfulness, are not functions of my planning, my manipulation, my management, my control, my expertise. Other forces are at work and other designs shape how the seed grows.
For today, listen to the parable for yourself.
What does it say to you about your spiritual journey?
What invitation do you hear in it?
Is there some action which would help you step more fully into God's invitation as you hear it in these words?
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