June 29, 2025:
We are still behind in the fields. I worked late. I will start early, but before I do, missing Mass, I want to read what it is that will be spoken in Mass I miss.
It is a confusing time in the Church. I don’t mean that in some soul-searching, reasserting of role and place in world as modernity struggles with identity, purpose, and meaning (such is always eternal and perpetual condition for world seeking meaning in mammon rather than God), but in a simpler way—I don’t know what Sunday is what. After Easter, the Church follows a pattern of Solemnities and Feasts and though I’ve sat in the pew, listened to, and prayed all my life, I never paid attention to what Sunday was to be preached.
Today is the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul. I look up what Mass is for today online, but I like reading from my leather Missal. In the Missal, I find the Mass, and it reverts me on to further pages like a “choose your own story” book I used to check out from my childhood library. I can’t keep up, and I still don’t want to read the readings from a screen; and so I revert to the Mass that would be, were it not a special solemnity.
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, I read:
“From the very beginning of the Church there were men and women who set out to follow Christ with greater liberty, and to imitate him more closely, by practicing the evangelical counsels. They led lives dedicated to God, each in his own way. Many of them, under the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, became hermits or founded religious families. These the Church, by virtue of her authority, gladly accepted and approved.”[i]
I turn the page. It is a reading from First Book of Kings. It is a story of a farmer.
What would I do if I were called? Am I being called and, like Jonah, in denial?
“The LORD said to Elijah: ‘You shall anoint Elisha, son of Sharphat of Abel-meholah, as prophet to succeed you.’
Elijah set out and came upon Elisha, on of Shaphat, as he was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen; he was following the twelfth. Elijah went over to him and threw his cloak over him. Elisha left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, ‘Please, let me kiss my father and my mother goodbye, and I will follow you.’ Elijah answered, ‘Go back! Have I done anything to you?’ Elisha left him, and taking the yoke of the oxen, slaughtered them; he used the plowing equipment for fuel to boil their flesh, and gave it to his people to eat. Then Elisha left and followed Elijah as his attendant.”[ii]
I have no oxen, only hundreds of horsepower in diesel engine drawing 24-row planter behind.
I read on. In Gospel, another story of a farmer:
“When the days for Jesus’ being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem, and he sent messengers ahead of him. On the way they entered a Samaritan village to prepare for his reception there, but they would not welcome him because the destination of his journey was Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this they asked, ‘Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?’ Jesus turned and rebuked them, and they journeyed to another village.
As they were preceding on their journey someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.’
And to another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he replied, Lord, let me go first and bury my father.’ But he answered him, ‘Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ And another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.’ To him Jesus said, ‘No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.’”[iii]
God checks my heart.
It is Sunday. I know where I want to be. I know where it is that I should be, but the fields are dry and we’re behind and—prioritizing mammon and not God, Holy Spirit directing my desire and inner knowing—I feel condemned, setting hand not plow but to no-till planter waiting in the field.
The sky is clouded. There is thunder in above, but it is light, like clouds’ cover and shade of gray that often burns away in morning’s rise.
Against conscience of my will, against the words of God shown to me right then, I still choose wrong—lie to myself and pretend not to hear.
I go to the field. I begin. Western sky does not lighten but shows darker, and I see the tails and shadow of rain beneath approaching as a wall.
Maybe, choosing against my own will, God will eliminate my options; reducing one-by-one my ability to choose wrong until all that’s left is HIM. It is a hope, salvation from myself, but hope is not full-belief and I keep to planting of the field.
The planter doesn’t work well. Like modern mankind in a way, it’s become over-technical, over-specialized, and it does not perform well in the variance of weather and conditions that arise in the true and living world, apart from man’s best efforts to insulate, standardize, and control.
In preceding air of the rain, seed swells in the seed meters. They do not feed well, and computers show the problem but offer no solution.
Using mind’s gift—God given ability to notice, change, and adapt—I raise the planting target population until the swelled and sticking seed is flushed from meters and lines and equipment works as engineered.
Storm nears. Mind’s gift, discerning, I know time in field is limited.
One more pass.
At far end of the field, rain arrives heavy and fast in squall. Seed population falls again. Mud builds on every tire: those of tractor, planter’s frame, and every depth and closing wheel per row.
I speak out loud.
“Thank you God! Thank you Jesus!” I mean it. “I want to be at Church. I want to be at Mass. Thank you for taking away my choice and letting me go where I want to be.”
I make it back to other end. I shut the tractor down, run for van through the heavy rain, and go where I know that I should be.
It will all work out. The work will get done. It’s when we give up on faith and try and force our own will when actions go most wrong. Have faith. Discern, and when God calls to go—go!
Removed from my own wrong choice—mammon’s—I leave the field, not looking back, and go as I am called thanking God, all the way, for saving me from myself and the choice I knowingly made.
[i] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 918
[ii] 1 Kings 19: 16b, 19-21
[iii] Luke 9: 51-62