My dear Friends:

Garden lovers, today’s gospel will resonate in your hearts! We plant seeds and saplings, water and nurture them. Day and night, quietly and ‘miraculously’ they germinate and push their heads through the soil. The sapling transforms itself into the sturdy oak, and the smallest of mustard seeds “springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.” Essentially, each one of us become Sowers of the seeds as we scatter our words and actions around us. Social media can be like the wind which carry our words and actions near and far. While we sleep, and live our days, these words and actions take root and grow. Very possibly, we do not know if they blossom and bear fruit. This is the beauty of God’s love flowing from the core of our being into the seeds we plant through our words and actions.

But you know, it is not just the scattering of those seeds of God’s Love, Compassion, Hope, Joy, Justice and Healing which we hear so much about…This pilgrimage of Life is also the amazing adventure of realizing our uniqueness in becoming God’s awe-filled creation. Realising, especially in the raging challenges of this pandemic that life is indeed ‘a mystery to be LIVED; not a problem to be solved’!

It is a time to focus our attention, even amid the frustrations, worries and concerns of current times, on the blessings which also touch our lives. Rumi once said that we should ‘wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life’. That savoring of life’s daily adventure (just think, in the history of the whole world, today has never happened before!!); how we ‘distil’ and process the joys, sufferings, successes failings, rewards, challenges which we experience, become sieve which make us who we are.

One of the great Greek writers, Nikos Kazantzakas, (Report to Greco), expressed this very well when he wrote: All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows.

Remember me as loving you,

Fr. Antony