From Season to Season

 " He said to one of them in reply, 'My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what is yours and go. What if I wish to give this last one the same as you?'" —Matthew 20:13-14 Even before the outbreak of the pandemic-when employment and economic uncertainty weren't as widespread as they are now-it wasn't uncommon to see groups of men and women standing in groups in the parking lots of hardware and home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowes. I never gave them much thought until a friend explained who they were: these were day laborers who were hoping that a contractor or someone needing help with a home repair project would hire them for the day or, at the least, for a few hours.   These people are continuing a tradition that is found in nearly every culture and, as we see in this Sunday's Gospel , was certainly common in Jesus’ day. One of my Salvatorian confreres who had worked in Arizona an...

Included in a collection of essays entitled A Maryknoll Reflection on the Liturgical Year is this story from Father Ken Tesing, a Maryknoll priest who spent decades serving in East Africa: I came back to the United States from my mission in Tanzania, and I was visiting my brother and his family at their farm. As farmers always do, we went out to look at the fields and crops. My brother asked me, “Look, do you recognize those weeds?” I replied, “No, I don’t think I have ever seen them before; how did they get into your fields?” He said, “Some years ago herbicides were developed; the weeds and grasses we struggled with in the crops when we were just growing up have all been eliminated. All these seeds were just lying dormant in the ground; they could not compete earlier with the dominant weeds and now they have sprouted and come forth.” We talked about this. My brother said farming is like life; there will always be challenges, always be differences. We need to be patient and t...

Once upon a time, a teacher told a story. It simply began: “A sower went out to sow.” It’s a story that has come down to us largely unchanged from the way it was first told. And it is a story that we know well. Unfortunately, it seems that many of the stories told by Jesus (the “Parables”) have lost their power to surprise and inspire us. There seems to be two reasons for this. The first is that they often include images and anecdotes from everyday life that are significantly unrelated from most of our day-to-day lives. After all, how many of us have any first-hand experience with sowing a field and understand what goes into cultivating a fruitful harvest. The second reason why these stories have lost their impact is that we know them too well. With the stories of the “ Prodigal Son ” and the “ Good Samaritan ,” the parable of the “Sower and the Seed” is among the best-known of these stories of Jesus.   In Saint Matthew’s account of the parable of the sower ( 13:1-9, 18-2...

The end of September and beginning of October are marked by a series of memorials and commemorations that serve to highlight the catholicity of the Church. From the Bohemian ruler Wenceslaus and the Filipino layman Lawrence Ruiz (a husband and father) and his martyred companions from Japan (on September 28) to the great biblical scholar and Father of the Church Jerome (on September 30), the cloistered missionary-at-heart Thérèse of Liseux (on October 1) and Carthusian founder Bruno (on October 6), to the Indiana foundress Theodora Guerin (on October 3) and the Louisana pastor and missionary Francis Seelos (on October 5) to the beloved Francis of Assisi (October 4), these days (which also include celebrations of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael [September 29] and the Guardian Angels [October 2]) remind us that the possibility for true holiness isn’t limited to one way of life, gender, or historical epoch. Saint Theodora Guerin (d. 1856) The Foundress of the ...