"Here is an image," He said, "of the Kingdom of Heaven. There was a man who sowed his field with clean seed."
"God is the Divine Sower ~ the world is His field. He sowed it in the beginning with all our necessities: bread, fruit, water, wine, linen, silk, and wool; resin, crystal, gold, oil, salt, fire, and light.
Before sin had brought pain into the world, God had hidden remedies for pain in it. Men would discover the gifts of the Divine Healer and call them by names as melodious as the names of the nine choirs of angels: camomile, hellebore, heartsease, thyme, verbena, lavender, dwale. Most wonderful of all, there was bread. God rejoiced in the world that He had made: "And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good." The Creator had stored the world for man, and to man himself He had given a mind and a will that would enable him to respond to His love. But God's joy at the dawn of His creation was in more than this.
In His field He had one little plot apart, lying under snow where no foot had ever trodden, silent with the silence of snow that no voice had ever broken. In it He sowed Living Bread. This little plot was our Lady. In her was sown the seed of Christ. The good seed which God had sown was the seed of His Son's life.
When the newly created water still tembled in the breath of the Spirit, and the seed was still hidden and all the wheat hidden in it, God saw His harvests. He saw the fields of ripe corn that would be irrigated by the Water of Life, the bound stooks, the grain sifted and gathered into His barns. He saw the green wheat springing up everywhere, from the most unlikely places on earth; not only from remote villages and hamlets, where no one would trample on it, but from thickly populated cities, forcing its way up between the paving stones ~ trampled, but lifting itself up when the sun that was His own love shone upon it, in the narrow streets of swarming slums, in the yards of tenements and prisons, from the ruins of men's homes destroyed by men.
Whenever the world grew old, the green fields renewed it; whenever it grew drab, the burnished harvests were its splendor.
What is this wheat with which God has sown His field ? Christ answered that question plainly: it is Himself. It is the Christ-life given to those who will take it; Christ is the bread that gives life to the world. Here are His own words: "It is I who am the bread of life."
"God's gift of bread comes down from Heaven and gives life to the whole world. . . . I myself am the living bread that has come down from Heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he shall live forever. And now, what is this bread which I am to give? It is my flesh, given for the life of the world." "
*excerpt from 'Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross: the little way of the infant Jesus' by Caryll Houselander
Advent will soon be upon us. The liturgical time for preparing our hearts for Him. I love what Caryll has to say here. For me it encapsulates the immensity of His gift, the beauty of His plan and the completeness of His love. I am in awe of our Blessed Mother who first opened her very self to Him in the flesh, that we too might know Him and carry His life within us, because it was His will. During this Advent season it is my prayer that I too allow the Christ life planted within me to grow. . . . and that I too will trust in His will for my life. . . . and harder still, that I might trust in His plan for the lives of those I love.
