The Impossible Soil

The Impossible Soil

Fr. Voigt (The Resistance)

Sunday Reflection: The Impossible Soil.

Who can grow wheat on a rock?  Who can produce a cherry tree from a hardened footpath? Or who can generate watermelons in a patch of thorns?  If these impossible soil situations exists then why would a sower broadcast his seed upon them?  These and many other questions came to the minds of the apostles and the disciples of Jesus when He told them the parable of the "Sower and the Seed."  It is a parable that Our Lord took time to explain.  There is a universal law of spiritual life underlying the whole parable:  we will reap what we sow.  

 

God sows the word of salvation.  The Word finds trodden hearts, hard hearts, worldly hearts and good hearts.  Each one produces according the development of their hearts.   Your heart, my friend, must bear fruit according to the attitudes which are within us.  We understand the symbolism of each heart:

1) pathway = the heart which receives the word but Satan takes it away immediately like the birds picking seed from a pathway; 2) the rock = the hardness of heart that comes from an attachment to some sin; 3) thorns and thistles = cares, riches and pleasures of the world; 4) good soil = a heart disposed to listen to the Word of God and protect it.  

Why then broadcast the seed to every type of heart?  Simply because God can and will work the miracle of conversions.  Prayer of intercessions from each of us can stimulate the faith life of the other individual.  We are not islands alone in a stormy sea.  We are intimately united to God and to each other.  For this reason saints like the Little Flower and others desired to save the souls of all mankind.  One drop of the precious Blood of the Lamb can soften the hardest rock found on this world of ours.  Imagine this precious blood irrigating the four soils situations.  Cannot the Blood of Christ conquer the trodden path, the rock and the thorns?

 

 

As Catholics we lift up our greatest prayer, the sacrifice of the Father's Son, and we beseech the Father through the Son for the souls who are so dead to the spiritual life.  We pay the price for the other soul whom we may not know but God knows.  One day we will come to the judgment seat of Christ and He will ask us to show Him our fruit.  Those souls ransomed by our sacrifices will cry out as our intercessors.  They will cry out:

"His sacrifice saved our hardened hearts and now we plead for his soul to come to the heaven promised to those who love their neighbors."  

 

What a joy to know that our life of merit here on earth can have an effect upon the world in which we live.  May God grant us the dark soil of a loving heart that we may make the sacrifices daily for the salvation of sinful souls in impossible situations.  We come to another Lent and what better can we do than ask Our Lord and Our Lady to guide us to the sacrifices necessary to save many souls.

In the hearts of Jesus, Mary and Joseph,

Fr. Richard Voigt