The other week I was transplanting strawberries and found myself carefully safeguarding every last handful of the good dirt. Thick, heavy, fertile black dirt that holds moisture, utterly unlike the sand pit that is my home’s native soil.
Dirt-quality matters so much that the first piece of gardening advice extension services offer is, “Please send us a sample of your dirt so we can tell you what’s wrong with it.”
Dirt matters.
I’ll be forever grateful, therefore, to the priest who unlocked the Parable of the Sower for me. I couldn’t get my head around this story, because it felt so, so wrong. If we are the people of the rocky path or thorny thicket, is our faith is just doomed? No hope for us, the seed sown on bad soil?
No, no! Father pointed to my local hero, the lady in charge of the parish gardens, and said, “Do what she does! If the dirt is no good, improve it!” The solution to thorns is careful weeding; the solution to stones is digging them out; the solution to infertile soil is mixing in the good dirt.
Okay, so far so good. As Lenten analogies go, it’s not that hard to figure out where our weeds and stones are. We’re usually aware of at least a few of our bad habits and attitudes that we need to try to eliminate. And in terms of improving the soil, I might think of the sacraments, prayer, almsgiving, good works, Bible reading — all that stuff — as the water and fertilizer for my faith.
But good dirt is more than that.
Good dirt is made of broken things, burnt things, and rotten things. All kinds of garbage that would otherwise stink up my kitchen is transformed into life-giving, fruit-bearing soil if I’ll just toss it on the compost heap and come back in a year.
The spiritual compost heap is penance.
Penance is more than just getting rid of our sins; it’s making our contrition part of our life.
Through contrition, confession, and acts of reparation, my old sins don’t just melt away into thin air, they completely change to become something good and life-giving. They aren’t my old sins anymore; now they’re the soil in which my ministry can grow.
I hope you were already doing penance out of pure love of Jesus Christ. If you haven’t been, try it right now: Jesus I love you and I’m so sorry that you had to suffer for my sins.
If you’re good at long prayers and rigorous fasts but you can’t honestly say, from the bottom of your heart, “Jesus I love you and I’m so sorry that you had to suffer for my sins,” then now you know what you’ve been missing out on. Pray for faith.
But once your heart is there, it can be easy to get discouraged when you keep finding all this yucky garbage in your soul. You feel like there’s no hope for you. You feel like the kitchen counter of your life is always going to be covered in disgusting rotten waste.
Not true. There’s lots of hope for you. Right now it’s stinky, nasty, fetid hope. But toss it on the penance heap and give it time. Through acts of love and reparation you can allow God to change your sins into fertile soil. The more you toss, the more better dirt you’ll have this time next year.