“Hear then the parable of the sower. The seed sown on the path is the one who hears the word of the kingdom without understanding it, and the evil one comes and steals away what was sown in his heart. The seed sown on rocky ground is the one who hears the word and receives it at once with joy. But he has no root and lasts only for a time. When some tribulation or persecution comes because of the word, he immediately falls away. The seed sown among thorns is the one who hears the word, but then worldly anxiety and the lure of riches choke the word and it bears no fruit. But the seed sown on rich soil is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”
Jesus doesn’t just tell this parable to the disciples. He tells it to the crowd — ordinary people like you and me, sitting on a beach, pressed together in the heat, listening from the water’s edge while he speaks from a boat.
And when the disciples ask him later what it means, he explains it plainly: the seed is the word of God. The soils are us — the different conditions of our hearts when that word arrives.
Most of us, if we’re honest, are not the rich soil.
We want to be. We show up to Mass. We pray, at least sometimes. We try. But the thorns are real. The financial worry that wakes you at three in the morning. The fear that you’re not doing enough, not being enough, that somehow your life hasn’t counted for what it should. The quiet pressure to earn something — God’s approval, other people’s respect, your own sense of worth. These things don’t announce themselves as thorns. They feel like reasonable concerns. Responsible worries. But slowly, without your permission, they crowd out the one thing that actually gives life.
Here is what I find remarkable about this parable: Jesus does not say the thorny ground is bad ground. He says the thorns choke the word. The ground received the seed. Something is alive underneath all that crowding, all that worry, all that striving.
The seed is still there.
The question this Sunday’s Gospel is asking is not — are you faithful enough? It is asking something quieter and more specific: what are the thorns in your life right now? Not to shame you. Just to name them. Because you cannot pull up what you have not first been willing to see.
Rosa had been awake since five.
Not because the baby cried — Mateo slept through now, finally — but because her mind wouldn’t stop its quiet accounting. The permission slip for Lucia’s field trip. The casserole she’d promised Father Reyes for the parish fundraiser. The thank-you notes from Marco’s First Communion that had been sitting in a drawer for three weeks. She lay in the dark and counted her failures the way some people count sheep.
By seven she had fed the children, packed lunches, and unloaded the dishwasher. By eight she was at the school drop-off, smiling at the other mothers, her hair brushed and her coffee already cold in the cupholder.
She had learned to smile at the school drop-off.
Daniel was home when she got back. He’d taken the morning off — something about a late meeting that night — and he was making eggs at the stove in his undershirt, humming something she didn’t recognize. He turned and smiled when she came in.
“You doing okay?” he asked. He handed her a fresh cup of coffee, hot this time.
She looked at him — her good husband, who worked hard and came home every night and never once made her feel like she wasn’t enough. She almost said something. She could feel it sitting in her chest, whatever it was, pressing against her ribs.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just tired.”
He kissed the top of her head and went back to his eggs. She stood at the kitchen counter and drank the coffee and watched the backyard through the window and didn’t say another word.
—
The women’s group met on Thursday evenings in the parish hall — twelve women, folding chairs, bad coffee, a candle lit in the center of the table. Rosa had been coming for two years. She always brought the good cookies. She listened carefully, asked the right questions, said things that were true but not too true. She had never said anything that required anyone to worry about her.
That Thursday she arrived early and arranged the cookies on a paper plate and was very precise about it without meaning to be.
The topic was prayer. How do you pray when you feel dry? When the words don’t come? Maria from the choir said she prayed the rosary in the car. Diane said she read the Psalms. The voices went around the circle, warm and practiced.
Then Carmen — seventy-something, gray braid, the kind of woman who had clearly stopped caring what anyone thought of her sometime around 1987 — looked directly at Rosa and said, “You’re very quiet tonight.”
Rosa opened her mouth. She had the answer ready. She’d been carrying it all evening.
The answer didn’t come out.
What came out instead was a long, slow breath. And then, quietly, almost to the table: “I’m tired.”
No one said anything. She felt the silence and kept going, the way you step off a ledge and there’s nothing to do but fall.
“I’m tired of trying so hard to be —” she stopped. The word she wanted was good. She didn’t say it. “I pray,” she said instead, “but it feels like I’m reciting a report. Like I’m telling God everything I’ve done and everything I still need to do and asking him to please be satisfied.” She looked down at her hands. “I don’t know when it turned into that.”
The room was very quiet.
Then Diane shifted in her chair. She was looking at the table. “I —” she started, and stopped. Started again. “Yes. I know that feeling.”
And then Maria, slowly, like she was confessing something: “Every Sunday I sit in that pew and think about what everyone else must think of me.”
And then others, one by one, not all at once — halting sentences, half-finished thoughts. The small, true things women say when they finally stop performing.
What was underneath wasn’t failure. It was just exhaustion. The exhaustion of performing goodness for an audience that had been performing right back.
Carmen let them talk. She didn’t rush it. When the room finally settled into something softer, she picked up her worn Bible from the chair beside her — the kind held together with a rubber band — and opened it without looking.
“There’s a woman in Mark’s Gospel,” she said. “She’s been sick for twelve years. She sneaks up behind Jesus in a crowd and touches his cloak, hoping no one will notice. She just wants to be healed and disappear.” Carmen paused. “Twelve years of carrying something alone. Twelve years of being too ashamed to ask directly.”
She looked around the table.
“Jesus stops. He finds her in the crowd. She falls at his feet, terrified, and tells him the whole truth. And do you know what he says?”
She read it slowly.
Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.
She closed the Bible.
“Not — do better. Not — here is what I need from you. Not — why did you wait so long?” Carmen’s voice was quiet and certain. “Just: Daughter. That’s who she is to him first. Before the twelve years of suffering. Before the fear and the shame. Before any of it.”
Rosa felt something release in her chest. Not dramatically — not like a flood. Just a slow, quiet loosening, like a knot that had been there so long she’d stopped noticing it.
She looked around the table at these women she had spent two years performing for. And saw, for the first time, that they were just like her. Tired. Trying. Beloved anyway.
She reached for a cookie.
The bad coffee tasted a little better than usual.
You scatter your word on the path, on the rock,
among the thorns — knowing most of it will not take root.
You sow anyway.
Teach us that kind of love.
The kind that gives without needing to see the harvest.
The kind that trusts the seed.
Make us good soil, Lord.
Not perfect soil. Not soil without stones or thorns.
Just ground that is open.
Ground that is willing.
Ground that says yes.
It is a supplement to — not a replacement for — your parish bulletin.