“My word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.” —Isaiah 55:11 

“A sower went out to sow.” —Matthew 13:3

 The idea of the Parable of the Sower is familiar to countless school children whose science projects depend upon the literal truth of what Jesus says about seeds and soil. 

I was once one of those children, wondering what to do about my junior high science project. Science was not my best subject, but I thought I could at least handle growing a few plants in different kinds of soil and charting their growth over a few weeks. 

So, I grew one plant in regular topsoil, another in rocky soil, and a few others under different conditions that I cannot quite remember anymore. I think I might have played Mozart next to one of the plants. What I remember clearly, however, is that changing the conditions of the soil did, in fact, make a difference in how well the plants grew.

I never considered pouring bleach into the soil of any of my plants, for the obvious reason that the plant would have died! But if the human heart is the soil to which Jesus is referring in the Parable of the Sower, then it seems that many people today are pouring bleach into that soil. 

The parable illustrates how the different kinds of soil relate to different conditions of the human heart: the trodden-down soil of the path stands for a lack of understanding, rocky soil represents fickleness (letting go of the Gospel easily, and usually quickly), and the soil with thorns stands for worldly anxiety and the lure of riches. These are timeless problems of the human heart, which is tempted again and again to move away from God and towards any number of supposed substitutes. 

The problems mentioned above are serious enough. But then what should we think about the way in which countless people, including many Catholics, seem to fill their hearts not with what will help the growth of the word of God, but with the poison of the world? To take just one example, what are we to say about a world in which the pornography industry makes more money each year than all of Hollywood’s entertainment industry, and more than all of the three largest professional sports leagues combined? Something even more evil than worldly anxiety is at work here. 

In talking about the cultural changes we have seen in the past 40 years or so, one of my seminary professors used to use the well-known image of a frog dropped into a pot of water on a stove. Apparently, a frog dropped into a pot of boiling water will immediately jump out. If the frog starts out in lukewarm water, however, and you slowly bring that water to a boil, the frog will quite happily allow itself to be boiled to death. I took the professors word for it; no frogs were harmed in the making of this article!

We are that second frog. Today, there are things shown on television during broad daylight that would have caused our grandparents or great-grandparents to take an ax to their TV sets. Yet the changes have come so gradually that many of us have hardly noticed them. Human nature has not changed, but what we inflict upon our human nature has changed a lot.

The end result, as we all know from our own experience, is that we live in a world of constant distraction, at best, and at worst we can do things to ourselves that alienate us from God and each other. Some people might say that the world has always had temptations of one kind or another. But I hope we can all agree that temptations have never been so easily and constantly available. They are often just one click away.

Noise, distraction, pleasure of all kinds, entertainment, and marketing that appeals to our lowest appetites all compete not just for our attention, but for our surrender. We should all take time to let that grim fact sink in.

Some of these worldly things are always bad, and others can be good if we use them in moderation. But do we use them in moderation? And do we avoid the things that are always bad? The Parable of the Sower offers a good reminder to examine our consciences about how we are nourishing—or poisoning—the soil of our hearts.

So, that is the bad news, and it is very powerful. But the Good News is always more powerful if we will listen and cooperate.

We hear the beginning of the Good News in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. The Lord tells us that His word, the seed He will plant in our hearts, “shall not return to (Him) void, but shall do (His) will, achieving the end for which (He) sent it.” God is not playing a game, or gambling, with us. Jesus died so that we could be free in Him, not enslaved by the things of the world. 

Hebrews 4:12 tells us that “the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword.” God’s word has the power to penetrate our hearts and to transform them. His word has the power to nourish our hearts and to grow in us so that our whole lives are transformed and we become more like Christ. And Jesus makes it clear that when the word is able to grow in good soil—hearts that are ready to receive it—the results are supernaturally abundant: “a hundred or sixty or thirty-fold” growth.

What God can do in our lives, if we let Him, is beyond anything we can possibly imagine. If your imagination is anything like mine, you probably find it easy to imagine two things: some wildly fantastic earthly success or all the ways your life can be sabotaged and you can shrivel up into nothing. When I was a kid, I would shoot hoops for hours in my family’s driveway, imagining that I was making the game-winning shot in the NBA finals. I didn’t quite make it! As I grew older, my positive imaginings became less fantastic. But on the negative side of life, I still had a very active imagination. I could think of every reason why ideas and plans might fail, whether they were my own ideas and plans or somebody else’s.

 What I had to learn—what we all have to learn—is to direct our imagination to the future God has in store for us, rather than getting wrapped-up in our own dreams or getting stuck anticipating future disasters. God’s plan is to make us saints, to make us holy, to make us like Him. God wants us to become great, people of joy and peace and love who share these gifts with others.

 That is why God plants His word in our hearts, and why it is a matter of life and death that we do our part to prepare the soil of our hearts. That is why we need to avoid pouring toxins of any kind into our soil. And so I would like to offer a few practical steps we can take to receive God’s word as well as possible and encourage its growth in us:

• First, we need to repent of any ways we have poisoned the soil of our hearts. God can and will forgive anything, if we just bring it to Him in confession. We may have dumped bottle after bottle of bleach into our soil, but God can draw it out and make our hearts new again.
  
  
• Second, we should pray for the Gift of the Holy Spirit, both to purify our hearts and to protect us in times of temptation.
  
  
• Third, we need times of silence in our lives. I talk to lots of busy people all the time, and I know how hard this can be, but we have got to carve out some time to shut out the noise of the world and let God speak to us. Even five minutes a day in the car would be a great start.
  
  
• Fourth, we need to go beyond eliminating the toxic elements in our lives and to replace them with good things. If I have had some friendships that were leading me away from Christ, I need to develop some new friendships that bring me closer to Him. If I have been using harmful entertainment, it is good to find music and movies and such that I can enjoy and that will not compromise my relationship with God. I do not mean that every friend needs to be a devout Catholic or every TV show as wholesome as Little House on the Prairie (a favorite of mine), but we do need to be honest with ourselves about the impact these influences have on us.
  
  
• Fifth, we need to engage the word of God. Listening well at Mass is critical, but it is also very helpful to read Scripture during the week. Again, spending a few minutes a day or even just reading the Mass readings before Sunday would be a great way to start. We cannot expect the word to grow in us if we do not know the word to begin with.
  
  
• Sixth, I think we need to be very careful about complaining and sarcasm, and about becoming cynical. A quick tour of social media or the comments section of many online news articles would be enough to tell us that these are real problems today. And they can easily make our hearts bitter, as if we had poured vinegar into our soil and drowned out the seed God had planted there.

Finally, nothing will do more to enrich the soil of our hearts than the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We must always thank God for the gift of His word and of His Body and Blood. And we must commit to cultivating the growth of His word in ourselves and to sharing this gift with others.