The Potentiality of Seeds

          The problem with seeds lies in what Paul Ricoeur would call their mysterious potentiality. Closed in upon themselves, almost secretive, they hide all kinds of possibilities within their stubborn shells, not sharing their mysteries with us in the present. It requires the complex workings of our imaginations to look at a lumpy little seed and to see a tall stalk of corn or a waving field of wheat. The seed’s protective shell demands of us a certain faith that future vision will indeed emerge from present reality.

          A few summers ago, I got the notion to plant some flowers in a lovely container on my patio. As I planted my package of seeds, scattering what looked like hard grains of dirt all over the vitamin-enriched potting soil, I could immediately see in  my mind’s eye the tall, beautiful potential blossoms; I could smell their sweet scent and could imagine them waving softly in the summer breeze. The next day, however, my two-year-old great-nephew came to town for a visit. Puttering around my patio, he spied my planter, and mischief glimmered in his eyes. I explained to him that he should leave the pot alone, since I had just planted flowers in it …. But despite my clear warnings, he couldn’t put together in his mind the “flowers” that he heard me describe, and the empty reality that he saw in the nice “miniature sandbox” right at his level. In the blink of an eye, my bountiful flower “harvest” lay scattered in clumps on the concrete and clung to sweaty two-year-old fists. In the simplicity of his vision, my little great-nephew didn’t grasp the glorious potential of seeds. I, on the other hand, did not grasp in my flights of fancy that seeds require some careful tending before they can be called flowers. The challenge before us, Jesus implies in the parable of the sower, is to recognize the potentiality hidden in the present and—somehow—to tend it.

In the Gospels, the parables of Jesus are themselves like seeds:

mysterious, enveloped in a tough, hard-to-crack shell, difficult to categorize

and to understand. Like the truth that they carry within them, the parables

          are deceptively simple and unremarkable in appearance, yet they are bearers of enormous transformative power. Unfortunately, rather than hearing the parables in their transforming truth, we, like Matthew in today’s Gospel, tend to allegorize Jesus’ strange tales, to tame them so that the elements line up logically and the stories mean just one thing. In the parable of the sower, so often we turn—like Matthew does in verse 18—to focus on the soil, rather than on the more nebulous potentiality of the seed itself.  We immediately start to judge our own spiritual soil, or the soil of our neighbors, weighing who might treat the seed well and who might squander its gifts. With the precision of a horticulturalist, we measure the depth of our thoughts, the fecundity of our hearts, the size of the pebbles blocking our wills. We want to reassure ourselves that we will be among those who will welcome the word with a dark, rich loam, the kind found deep beneath an ancient forest floor. And we imagine how the hard-hearted unbelievers next to us will only squander God’s word upon the rocky soil of their inadequate souls.

          Yet Jesus begins his parable with a wide-open image. As he was speaking to the crowd at the seaside, his listeners knew that there were a large number of Galilean farmers out in the hills around them, casting seed upon the ground in a timeless, simple gesture of sowing. Jesus tries to wake his listeners up, to encourage them to look at the farming scenes around them in a new and different light. He shouts, “Let anyone who has ears to hear, hear!” “Pay attention! Right now, as you watch your neighbors sow their fall crops, the compact little seeds of the kingdom—those tiny specks no bigger than  mustard seeds—are being sown. At this moment. All over. In all kinds of places. Not just in the places that you would expect. Not just in the favorable places, or in the places were you like to look for them, but everywhere.” In his parable, Jesus presents to our imaginations not only the seeds that withered and the seeds that were choked, but he opens our minds to the seeds that are still growing up and increasing, with ever greater and greater yields.

          The catch is that, no matter how hard we try, we, like my little great-nephew, have trouble seeing potentiality. When faith tells us one thing and we seem to see another, we are left squinting and rubbing our eyes. We believe, for example, that we are the body of Christ—yet often when we gather, we see individuals struggling to work together. We talk about Eternal Life and Resurrection, and yet we watch loved ones suffer and die. We read about signs of the kingdom of God breaking forth, yet every day we pass by signs of injustice and poverty. We are like Sarah, laughing in incredulity as God tells us that we will give birth to nations while seeing only the wrinkled, sagging skin of our old age. How much easier it is to walk through the fields and point out the worm-eaten sprouts and shriveled leaves around us that it is to speak confidently of the abundant, hundred-fold yield that will come from clusters of grain only a few inches tall.

          Seeing potentiality, and living by it, is a spiritual discipline. Not long ago, I came across the night-time prayer that Eleanor Roosevelt used as she took a key role in the creation of the universal declaration of human rights. This strong woman of action prayed at night, “Make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.”[1] It is interesting to note that Roosevelt’s drive to work for change in the world was accompanied by her nightly practice of praying to be made aware of potentiality. As she sat, day after day, week after week, in a room full of stinging cold War rhetoric, dealing with soaring egos, blind governments, and impossibly lofty ideals, her prayer kept her eyes open to the potentiality of one-hundred fold yields. Seeing the world as God sees it, as “a world made ever new,” Roosevelt was able to persevere in her work, to respond to what she saw, and to work for God’s Kingdom.

          Can we train ourselves to look at our church community in light of God’s gift of potentiality? Can we look at St. Thomas like a seed about to break out of its shell? Can we gather each week as if we are gathering in a world made new in Christ? Can we yield fruit more abundant than seems logically possible? Yes, we can. It will take time, and prayer, and practice. It will take coming together with hearts full of prayer and with eyes open to see what lies beneath the surface of things. Living into potentiality doesn’t mean just sitting back and imagining some vague and easy flowering that will come someday, without any effort on our parts. Neither does it mean flinging dirt around like my great-nephew, ignoring the seeds that God has planted in our midst. We can look at our parish and see cracks and weeds and empty pews. Or we can look at our parish and see God’s light shining through who we are and what we do. We can start listing our potential, God’s potential within us, rather than our troubles. We can pray that we, and others, will be able to see us as God sees us, filled with light and infinite possibilities. And we can show that true self out in the world. As God cries out to us, “Pay attention! The seed is being scattered here!” I pray that we will have all been trained by faithful spiritual practice to fall silent as we stand even on untilled soil and automatically to respond, “Pass me a scythe that I may join in the harvest!”

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[1] In Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), unnumbered page.