Dear Friends in Christ,
If you have not yet discovered this, you will soon learn that I am of Irish heritage on both sides of my family. In fact, my paternal grandparents came to Chicago from Ireland with my father in 1955, so we have always prided ourselves on being more recently
arrived immigrants to this country. My grandfather came from a very small town in the west of Ireland, just a very short distance from the Marian Shrine at Knock. It was there that Our Lady appeared together with St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist in 1879.
To see this place, you would think there was no more beautiful place in the whole world. However, my
grandfather used to refer to it as the “worst part of Ireland” for the reason that the soil there was so rocky. As they were farmers, like most people, it was very difficult to plow the land and you had to spend many hours picking the rocks out of the ground so that you could have a chance to grow some crops. It was
exhausting work.
We see what happens to the seed that falls on rocky soil in the gospel today. Jesus tells us that “it springs up at once because the soil was not deep, and when the sun rose it was scorched, and it withered for lack of roots.” In other words: it dies. Part of our everyday work of living as disciples of Jesus is to pick the rocks out of the soil of our hearts. It can be exhausting work – and it takes time. To look at the places in myself that block God from being able to love me is never
pleasant, but the alternative is far worse. God’s word longs to find a place to grow within our hearts so that we can be truly fruitful for our own salvation and for the sake of the world. Will we cooperate with God’s love for the purifying of our hearts?
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Fr. Thomas Byrne