Week 11—Sunday Mark 4:26-29
Week 11—SUNDAY
THE SEED AND THE SOIL ARE MADE FOR EACH OTHER
We have seen how the “flesh,” the material part of our personality, has been prepared to receive “the Word.” The Word and the flesh are made for each other as the seed and the soil. The seed rejects many things in the soil and selects only those elements akin to its own nature. So the Divine Word selects what is akin to its life in the soil of our lives, but rejects others. The Word rejects unnatural sin and selects only the truly natural good. Conversion is the response of the soil to the invasion of the Divine Seed, the Word. Just as the plant takes hold of elements in the soil akin to its own nature, transforms them and transfigures them, and makes them into the image of the plant, so the Word takes hold of the flesh and spirit and takes them up into the purpose of the Word and makes them into its own likeness.
For instance, here is foul, impure mud in a pond. On the bosom of the pond is a lotus flower: one in the mineral kingdom, the other in the plant kingdom—a higher kingdom. How can that lower kingdom get in to the higher? By trying? By lifting itself by its bootstraps? By education about the higher life? By joining a group to study the higher life? No, none of these, except they lead to one thing—surrender! The roots of the lotus flower come down and say to the impure mud: “Do two things: be willing to cease to be mud and surrender your life to my life. Let me have you.” And the mud does just that. It surrenders itself to the life of the plant, and it is lifted and transformed into the beauty of the lotus flower. It is born from the above. Except the mineral kingdom be born from above, it cannot see the kingdom of the plant. That mud is made for conversion. If it isn’t converted into a higher life, it has missed the end of its being. That is its destiny. It is predestined to the life of the plant. So we are predestined to conversion—predestined to rise from the kingdom of humans to the kingdom of God.
O Divine Word, we are the offspring of your purpose. And that purpose reaches down into our flesh. It was fashioned by you and for you. I feel that destiny pulsating within me, and when I respond, I respond to the Homeland pull. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: All day I shall respond to “the upward pull of God in Christ Jesus.”