The images in Sirach and Saint Luke’s Gospel in this Sunday’s readings create quite a mosaic collection of “fullness of heart.” The rhythm of winnowing, a potter’s preparation, and gathering fruit are not lofty images; they have been normal tasks for so many. What are we missing as symbols where we are and in the midst of our lives now? What blinds and blindsides us to holy potential?
It’s likely that not many of us have used a winnowing tray or fork. It takes a practiced, physical and attentive rhythm to use the pan or fork to separate seed and chaff. Seeds and grain may not even have been seen before the separating process. It’s done to collect grains of nourishment, and seeds for futures. The husks, the chaff are regenerative matter for other harvests. What shakes and sifts us in these times to seed a future and nourish life differently … personally, as a Christian, as part of One Earth Community? Complacency is not part of winnowing.
“The test of what the potter molds is in the furnace.” Maybe not many of us have harvested raw clay from riverbanks and hand purified it with the messy, attentive and discerning work of removing particles that could cause a piece of pottery to burst in the intense heat of a kiln or furnace. What is it that we cannot let just slide by and not be attentive to as we hope to create a just and safe world in our lifetime? What are we called to feel, and say, or do something about — sometimes at great cost? How do we gather what may seem broken and offer hope and help envision something new?
I now live in a place of many fruit trees. Last year’s harvest was plentiful with each piece large and beautiful and branches strained with the yield. This year’s fruit is so small after not having had rain for a year and certainly more intense temperatures. Can a tree really be judged bad or rotten without considering a healthy ecosystem in which to grow and be sustained? What is our part in creating maintaining healthy environments of all kinds?
These are such quickly shifting and trying times in the world: surprising decisions, policies created without wide consultation, questioned alliances, fears of adequate availability of all things that sustain life, catastrophic environmental events with ensuing loss and grief, displacement of peoples, and awaking to the fact that things have never been this way before. It isn’t so easy to just name things as good and evil. Values run an extensive span of prevailing greed to compassionate love and generosity. But, no matter what, it is part of our responsibility as God’s own to winnow and wedge and gratefully gather and share in this now and for a future. What does fullness of heart mean for us as disciples of Jesus? Suffering is also part of fullness. “Tribulation is the test of the just.”
Saint Luke so cleverly offers the poignant glimpse between a splinter and a beam, assigning bigger, stronger, and more blinding obstacle to us. “Why do you notice the splinter in another’s eye?” Challenges to our own willingness and ability to live in complexities comes back to us, without exception. Planks of blindness: insecurities, arrogance, judgement, fear, lack of commitment, forgetting impacts of our actions … and others you may know well. And let’s not miss noticing in this parable: seeing eyes, seeing another, potentially seeing the way another sees, seeing splinters of pain, and seeing, obstruction of light. What a humble privilege.
What does today’s Gospel remind us to do? What dispositions to hold? How can we winnow and wedge our own lives?
Notice. Perceive. Remove obstacles. See clearly. Bear good fruit. Be known. Produce good. Speak from fullness of the heart.
Know there are eyes looking back at us, disciples of Jesus.
Maryknoll Sister Janet Hockman, a trained spiritual director, served in the Marshall Islands and in Nepal, offering counseling and leading retreats and prayer groups. She also worked in Haiti and Chicago and in vocation ministry for the Maryknoll Sisters.
To read other Scripture reflections published by the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, click here.
Featured image: A potter molds clay to fashion a vase. Pottery is one of many metaphors for spiritual life drawn from the Mass readings for this year’s Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. (SwapnIl Dwivedi via Unsplash)
