March 15, 2005

Lent is a time of, among other things, self-examination. Not introspection, but healthy self-examination. How am I doing spiritually? How is my relationship with Christ? One of the many criteria we can use to examine our spiritual lives is the biblical concept of “fruitfulness.” Is my life bearing the kind of spiritual “fruit” or results that God desires of me? Near the beginning of His public ministry Jesus relates to His disciples what I would call His “prototypical” parable of the Sower and the Seed (Mark 4:1-20). It’s a parable about fruitfulness that answers the question of why or why not the “seed” of the Word of God is fruitful in our lives. Jesus speaks of four different types of soil, really types of persons, onto which the seed of God’s Word falls: a hardened footpath, shallow rocky soil, soil with thorns and weeds, and finally rich, fruitful soil.

Basically, according to the parable, the obstacles to fruitfulness come down to the following, each of which goes one layer deeper into our being. On the level of perception we are distracted, inattentive, forgetful and scattered. We don’t pay attention, at least not full attention to God and what He’s trying to say to us. And so, His Word doesn’t even germinate in our lives. The next level is one of habit and discipline. We are superficial and spoiled, and so when some difficulty enters into our spiritual lives that requires perseverance or contradicts our preferences, we give up. Thirdly, we are divided on the deepest level of desire, wanting to serve both God and mammon, and manifesting this by what we worry about (worry is the other side of the coin of desire).

Serious spiritual self-examination is never fun, but it does produce a diagnosis and point to a remedy which consists in three qualities or types of fruit we can strive for in this season of Lent: attentiveness, perseverance and single-heartedness.

Fr. Herald J. Brock, CFR
Local Servant, Convento San Serafin, Comayagua, Honduras

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