The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
Upon her death, a very wicked woman was cast into hell. With great mercy, her guardian angel sought to find a good deed from her life that might merit her salvation. As it turns out, she had once given a raw onion to a beggar. The Lord tells the angel to pull the woman out of hell by the onion and bring her into paradise.
As the angel carries the woman toward blessed eternity with God, other souls grab onto her, seeking the same heavenly reward. The woman begins kicking them away and shouting, “It’s my onion! Not yours!” The onion snaps, and the woman falls back into a lake of fire.
I hope that today your parish reads the full Gospel and not the optionally shortened version, for it is after the parable that we get the disciples’ wonderful question: “‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’” The Lord notes that “they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand,” whereas the disciples “see and hear.”
Stories have a way of getting at the heart of things—of conveying the fullness of truth, and the Parable of the Sower seems to show us that the disposition that can be moved by stories is also the one that can receive the seed of Christian truth.
Some of us are merely “on the path,” and in our aimless progression we are quick to lose what is planted in us; others of us on “rocky ground” can experience the fleeting joy of a transient faith that, unrooted, does not persist beyond the moment; others still are “among the thorns” and let the world choke out what may have grown more full. Or perhaps more precisely, all of us struggle to embrace the fullness of truth in each of these ways throughout our lives.
But with growing receptivity, our eyes and ears may open and let the seed find the good soil of our inner castles, which we tend with prayer and study, charity and faith.
And if we do, perhaps we will be “blessed” like the disciples, able to “bear fruit” with increasing abundance. Perhaps we will hear stories like the parable of the onion above, from The Brothers Karamazov, and not simply hear but truly understand. And we may even feel the echoes of a poem’s last line: You must change your life.
Daniel Gray is a teacher and writer living in Central Texas. An adult convert to Catholicism, he loves his faith-filled and inspiring wife, Regina, his toddler son, Ezra, his floppy daughter, Eloise, and his unborn baby. He writes short reflections on the Catholic life at Backward Progress.
