{"id":21607,"date":"2022-08-29T07:36:48","date_gmt":"2022-08-29T11:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=21607"},"modified":"2022-08-29T09:59:19","modified_gmt":"2022-08-29T13:59:19","slug":"21607","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=21607","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Weeds and the Wheat<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/trXXF8rwhpM\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>This week\u2019s Daily Meditations focus on Jesus\u2019 parables as teachings intended for our spiritual transformation. In this homily, Father Richard Rohr describes how Jesus\u2019 parable of the weeds and wheat offers insight into becoming compassionate, \u201cboth-and\u201d people instead of \u201ceither-or\u201d people.&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/email.cac.org\/t\/d-l-fktkydy-tlkriywur-y\/\"><em>Click here to read the Gospel passage<\/em><\/a><em>&nbsp;(Matthew 13:24\u201330).&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This Gospel is not only extremely insightful, it\u2019s also very realistic and compassionate. With injustices and crises in every part of the world, many of us are asking ultimate questions about good and evil. \u201cWhere do the weeds come from? Where does evil originate? Why do people do such harmful things?\u201d I ask this about a dozen times every day. This world doesn\u2019t make sense. How can people be so malicious, so unkind, so uncaring? It\u2019s like we don\u2019t know how to care anymore, as though we don\u2019t know how to access our own hearts, our own souls, and our own spirits.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For those of us who grew up as Christians, we may have heard this parable when we were younger. We may have been told to pull out the imperfect weeds and get rid of our faults. But since we really <strong>couldn\u2019t get rid of them, we covered them up and pretended we didn\u2019t have them. And that just doesn\u2019t work.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet Jesus shows us an absolute realism. He says something that was never said to me when I was a young person: \u201cLet the weeds and the wheat both grow together.\u201d Wow! That\u2019s risky. I can\u2019t pretend to logically understand it, although I know it allows me to be compassionate with myself. After all, I\u2019m also a field of weeds and wheat, just like you are, and just like everything is. <strong>Everything is a mixed bag, a combination of good and bad. We are not all weeds, but we are not all wheat, either<\/strong>. We have to learn, even now, to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality in ourselves and in everybody else. If we don\u2019t, we normally become very angry people. <strong>Our world is filled with a lot of angry people because they cannot accept their own weeds.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To accept this teaching doesn\u2019t mean we can say, \u201cIt\u2019s okay to be selfish, violent, and evil.\u201d It simply means that we have some realism about ourselves and each other. We have to <strong>name the weed as a weed. We can\u2019t just pretend it\u2019s all wheat, all good, because it isn\u2019t. <\/strong>We\u2019re not perfect. Our countries are not perfect. The Church is not perfect.<strong> The project of learning how to love\u2014which is our only life projec<\/strong>t\u2014is quite simply learning to accept this. If you really love anybody, and I hope you all do, then you have learned to <strong>accept a person despite, and sometimes even because of, their faults.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What love means is to say, <strong>\u201cI know your faults, I see your weeds, and I care for you anyway.\u201d Only God\u2019s heart, only the mind of Christ in us, really and fully knows how to do that.<\/strong><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Wisdom Teachings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Episcopal priest and CAC emerita teacher Cynthia Bourgeault describes how Jesus\u2019 parables are a part of a genre that aims to bring about inner change in the hearer:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Parables are a wisdom genre. They belong to&nbsp;<em>mashal<\/em>, the Jewish branch of the universal tradition of sacred poetry, stories, proverbs, riddles, and dialogues through which wisdom is conveyed. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We can see the razor edge of [Jesus\u2019] brilliance as he takes the familiar world of&nbsp;<em>mashal&nbsp;<\/em>far <strong>beyond the safety zone of conventional morality into a world of radical reversal and paradox. He is transforming proverbs into parables<\/strong>\u2014and a parable, incidentally, is n<strong>ot the same thing as an aphorism or a moral lesson<\/strong>. Its closest cousin is really the Buddhist&nbsp;<em>koan<\/em>, <strong>a deliberately subversive paradox aimed at turning our usual mind upside down. .<\/strong> . . Their <strong>job is not to confirm but to uproot<\/strong>. You can imagine the effect that had on his audience! Throughout the gospels we hear people saying again and again, \u201cWhat is this he\u2019s teaching? No one has ever said anything like this before. Where did he get this? Where did he come from?\u201d [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Theologian Harvey Cox explores how parables invite the hearer to encounter God in an everyday and ever-changing reality:&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Stories were Jesus\u2019 stock-in-trade, the main medium by which he conveyed his message. The parables occupy fully 35 percent<\/strong> of the first three Gospels. But one of their most surprising features is that<strong> they are&nbsp;<\/strong><em><strong>not about God.<\/strong>&nbsp;<\/em>They are about weddings and banquets, family tensions, muggings, farmers sowing and reaping, and shrewd business dealings. God is mentioned in only one or two. . . . Rabbi Jesus obviously wanted us to look closely at&nbsp;<em>this&nbsp;<\/em>world, not some other one. It is here and now\u2014all around us in the most ordinary things\u2014that we find the divine presence. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Jesus\u2019 stories, though similar to Zen&nbsp;<em>koans&nbsp;<\/em>in some ways, were also different in important respects. While the Zen stories aim at changing one\u2019s&nbsp;<em>perception&nbsp;<\/em>of the world, Jesus wanted people to see that&nbsp;<em>the world itself was changing,&nbsp;<\/em>and that therefore, they had better change the way they looked at it. He invited them, in effect, to become part of the change. Time after time he said, \u201cThey that have eyes to see, let them see, and they that have ears, let them hear.\u201d <strong>He simply wanted people to&nbsp;<\/strong><em><strong>pay attention&nbsp;<\/strong><\/em><strong>to what was going on around them and to discern a reality that was just under their noses.<\/strong> To describe this change he used a term that his listeners would have found familiar, though they might have been startled by the way he used it. He called it the coming of the \u201creign of God.\u201d What he meant was that something was happening, not just in the consciousness of the listener,<strong> but also in the world itself. Something new and unprecedented was happening, and they could be a part of it. [2<\/strong>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"408\" src=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-8-500x408.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-21611\" srcset=\"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-8-500x408.png 500w, https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-8-300x245.png 300w, https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-8-768x627.png 768w, https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/image-8.png 1592w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Weeds and the Wheat This week\u2019s Daily Meditations focus on Jesus\u2019 parables as teachings intended for our spiritual transformation. In this homily, Father Richard Rohr describes how Jesus\u2019 parable of the weeds and wheat offers insight into becoming compassionate, \u201cboth-and\u201d people instead of \u201ceither-or\u201d people.&nbsp;Click here to read the Gospel passage&nbsp;(Matthew 13:24\u201330).&nbsp; This Gospel [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21607"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21607"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21613,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21607\/revisions\/21613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}