066-915 0530 || 
This is still a continuation of my reflections from my walk up a mountain on the Kerry Way with my dog. The Gospel reading for that Sunday was the one about the weeds in the wheat field, so that was very much on my mind as I was traipsing up the mountain. The parable is that the servants of the farmer see that there are weeds in the wheat field and ask if they should weed them out. The farmer says no, that they should just leave the weeds as they might pull up the wheat with the weeds. He says leave it until the harvest and then sort them out. This makes me think of two things, the first being my Uncle whose garden I was set to work in every weekend. My Uncle did not take this attitude to gardening and insisted that every bit of every weed was irradiated. The other thing this reminds me of is an occasion when a young person was helping in our prayer garden in St.Michael’s. I asked him to weed the flower bed well and to be fair he took me at my word and cleared the bed, there were no weeds and nearly no flowers left! So unlike my uncle, I can see the wisdom in the parable. The image that the parable brings into my mind is the cartoon, where there is a sculptor who has created a marvellous statue and then realizes there is a rough bit at the bottom, he or she then goes to tip off this spur with their hammer or chisel. Instead of the rough spur coming cleanly off, the entire statue starts to crack and then crumble to dust, apart from the spur which stays exactly as it was and is the only piece of rock left. As I was going up the mountain having faced off the sheep, this was in my head and I was asking myself, how much do we define things negatively. Is that really productive? Does it get the best out of life. I have seen a lot of people worrying about dealing with the bad bits recently. The sort of attitude that if you get 90% you worry about how you left the 10% behind. I hear a lot of this in sport of late, the bit you left behind. Now I follow Wexford Hurling and I watch Irish rugby in the 90’s so I know about epic failure and noble defeat and I also remember ‘97 and when BOD started on the Irish team, so I know what its like to see your team win and how nice that can be. However in both those cases and in the case of our national cricket team, what got them up was doing something right more that stopping doing something wrong. Get something right and concentrate on that, build on it, make that you focus. Accentuate the positive and you will overcome the negative. After all when you are describing yourself to someone you don’t say to them what you don’t like and what you bad at, so why take that attitude to life or more dangerously to religion. The parable was Jesus’ way of giving out to the religious of His day for being too, ‘ don’t do this and don’t do that’. Well if you tell someone to sit in a corner and NOT think about purple penguins, whats going to happen...exactly. So, “mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí”, and I have recently learned the corollary, “buail so tóin í agus titfidh sí”. Any preacher who talks more about sin than grace, needs to get out more, and reread the Gospels.
So to finish what would I say about my uncle and my youth assistant? Well, one was only trying to get rid of stuff and so got rid of stuff I wanted as well as stuff I didn’t. My uncle though was only concentrating on his spuds and brassicas. The weeds only went as a result of his care for the plants he wanted, so maybe his attitude is not so far from my own.
Rev. Máirt, one wife, two Sundays left till term time, three kids, four Father Ted t-shirts