What Takes Root in the Heart
What takes root in your heart? What do you feed? What grows like a weed and festers in your soul? What do you give your attention to? And what nourishes you? What arises magnificently within, and touches and even profoundly transforms others? This morning, I took my mother to church. She is visiting me, and will be a great help during my surgery and subsequent convalescence later this week. It was a long mass at St. John Neumann , in Reston, VA , which included the baptism of three children, and the farewell homily of a resident priest. The homily was based on one of my favorite scripture passages, the parable of the sower and his seeds ( Matthew 13: 1-23 ). For those who are unfamiliar with this reading, the passage recounts a story of a sower whose seeds fell on a ground where they were eaten by birds, on a shallow surface, where the nascent shoots became scorched because they had no roots, among the thorns, where the sprouts were strangled, and upon good soil, where the seeds laid d...