Last Wednesday afternoon, I happened to go to Woolworths at Box Hill to pick up a few things for the house. While searching around for the items I needed, I saw a worker doing his job, opening boxes of canned food to put them on the shelves. Suddenly one of the boxes broke open and a couple of dozen cans spread all over the floor. Before I could react, I saw a little boy, around 5-year-old, quickly run to the worker’s section and start to help pick up the cans. As the cans were reasonably big for his little hands, and the shelf was rather high, he used both hands and stood on tiptoe to place one can at a time on the shelf. Obviously, the worker was also quickly picking up the cans, nevertheless the boy was quietly and patiently picking up as many as he could, one at a time, without a word. As I watched, he placed three or four cans on the shelf.
I was particularly moved by such a beautiful and quick reaction from this little child, and as I turned to the right, where his mother and grandmother stood, I could see a great sense of pride and joy on their faces about their little one.
“A good person draws what is good from the store of goodness in his/her heart”. This statement comes from the Gospel of Luke this Sunday. It indeed tells us that it was not out of nowhere such a good reaction came about. It is not an overnight-formed reaction but rather it is a long and patient process of forming and educating to store such goodness in the child’s heart from the child’s parents. That process is needed to continue constantly, as badness could creep in and replace goodness as the same Gospel’s message suggests: “a bad person draws what is bad from the store of badness.” The metaphor that Jesus uses to demonstrate this very message is an agricultural image of a tree that bears fruits. “There is no sound tree that produces rotten fruit, nor again a rotten tree that produces sound fruit.”
As a person who was born into a farming family and grew up on agriculture, I very much appreciate the metaphorical images that Jesus and the author of the book of Ecclesiasticus or Sirach use. In the first reading, the author highlights to us that not only actions that reflect our hearts but words could also manifest our true character.
“In a shaken sieve that rubbish is left behind,
So too the defects of a person appear in his talk.
The kiln tests the work of the potter,
The test of a person in his/her conversation…
Do not praise a person before she/he has spoken,
Since this is the test of them.”
What kind of heart we would like the people to see is very much in our daily conversations. People could recognise the beauty of our hearts through our words or speeches that we share.
Certainly, Lent will be a special time of the liturgical year when we will have personal and communal time to look again into our own hearts and the heart of our community to see whether we have the same heart and mind of Jesus whose heart is full compassion, love and mercy.
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Laura Facci says:
Wonderful homily Father Sang.