Word to the Wise
Thursday, August 3, 2023 - Thursday in the 17th Week in Ordinary Time
[Exod 40:16-21, 34-38 and Matt 13:47-53]"The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind. When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away." [Matthew]
I once gave a retreat for the Brothers of the Sacred Heart at a retreat center in southern MIssissippi. They ran several high schools in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. They had a custom of inviting staff members from those schools to join them on the retreat. They requested a particular format that was familiar to me and many American Dominicans, called PARABLE in which all the preaching was on the scriptures assigned for the day, i.e. at Morning Prayer on the first reading and at Mass in late afternoon, on the gospel. In the evening, there would be an optional sharing session in which retreatants could speak about how the particular scriptures for the day had impacted them. The gospel for one of the days was the parable of the dragnet with the image of sorting out the fish. A woman from one of the schools on the gulf coast said she had an uncle who was a commercial fisherman. He had commented to her about the practice of his competitors, Vietnamese fishermen, who had migrated to the gulf coast of MIssissippi during the Vietnam War. Unlike her uncle, who threw back the fish he wasn't trying to catch, the Vietnamese kept everything. She said, "You know, I keep praying that God is Vietnamese!" I have never forgotten her words.
Jesus does warn us that there will be a "sorting out" of some kind. The Gospel According to Matthew recounts, toward the end, the parables of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, the talents, and the final judgment - all in chapter 25. The well known "Fisherman's Prayer," a copy of which my dad, an avid fisherman, kept by his bed, ends with the words, "good enough to keep!" All of us can pray for that. We have been invited to the Kingdom and it is really up to us to RSVP to the mercy that sent the invitation. AMEN