In May of last year, when I was on the Camino in Spain with a group of young adults, I had a free day to myself before I returned to the United States. I decided to visit the city of Segovia, site of a famous Roman aqueduct built in the first century and the shrine where St John of the Cross is buried. In Segovia, I also got to visit the home of the famous Spanish poet Antonio Machado, who died in 1939. In this humble apartment, Machado wrote many of his well-known poems. One of Machado’s poems talks about the state of his soul. This is what Machado wrote:
One clear day the wind with the
aroma of jasmine called my heart:
( The wind said:) "In exchange for my aroma I'd love to
have the fragrance of all your roses."
(I replied:) " I have no roses, there aren't any
flowers in my garden; all have died."
(The wind then said:) " I will then take the fountain's waters,
the yellow leaves and the withered petals."
The wind left...My heart wailed....
" Soul, what have you done to your garden?"
As Machado writes, our soul can be a beautiful garden, with lovely flowers and a sweet aroma. Or our soul be a garden where all the flowers have withered, where there is nothing be dead plants and parched ground.
The parable of the weeds that Jesus presents to us today addresses how we can think we are doing all the right things on our journey of faith, like going to mass and cultivating our prayer life and reaching out to others in works of charity. We can be confident that we are doing the right things in our life of faith, but the weeds or other expectant things can still spring up and surprise us. While we should not be anxious or paranoid, we cannot live in a state of complacency either. We still need to before of those things for which we are to repent and to renew ourselves. We are still to purge the weeds that take root in our hearts.
God to come to us in a quiet whisper or a calm breeze, just as the spirit of the divine spoke in Machado’s poem in the wind fragranced with the aroma of jasmine. God’s message of salvation and God’s call to follow him can be as subtle and as beautiful as the smell of jasmine blooming on a hot summer’s night. Yet, if we’ve neglected our faith, if the garden of our soul has not been cultivated, we might not be ready to receive his message, no matter how beautiful and inviting that message may be.
When I was in Rome with the youth choir from St Richard Church in Jackson back in 2010, we visited St Paul’s basilica outside the ancient walls of Rome. For centuries, Church officials had tried to find the exact place where Paul’s tomb was located. One spot of ground was ruled out because it looked like it was solid rock, so they thought that there was no way St Paul could have been buried on that spot. However, it turned out not to be rock, it was just soil that had been hardened for so long that it was hard as rock. Underneath that hard soil was the place where the tomb of St. Paul was finally found in 2006, not that long ago. Just like soil that can become hard as a rock, our hearts can become so hard that we might not think that this is the place where we will find God or find meaning in life, so we start looking in other places.
The great Catholic writer Ron Rolheiser writes that there are many tragic ways to die in our world, but there are two ways that are most tragic of all. If we die without expressing the love we have in our hearts for God and for our brothers and sisters, or if we die without feeling the love that God has for us, without feeling the love of our brothers and sisters, that is the greatest tragedy of all. Indeed, God is love. And since we were made in the image of God, we are called to love, we are called to experience the love of others. May we cultivate our lives of faith so that we are always ready to experience God.
