On Seeds

For inscrutable reasons water and sunshine love seeds into breaking forth from their

shells and dipping their pale green toes into the dirt. Timidly they reach down, acquainting

themselves with the dirt; it is here that they gently arrange themselves, here first, down first.

Plants grow rather upside-down before they undertake to grow right-side up. To wit, such

a plant, conceptually identifiable by its right-side up structure, attends first to its up-side down

structure. Despite being acclaimed for the above-the-soil appearance, these green subjects are

radically unhurried about hastening their development. They acclimate to the downwards,

bashfully making friends with their fellow earth dwellers.

With their first step out of their shelter into the unknown, they are met with more

darkness. Ostensibly, this second darkness is so much the worse: unlike the darkness of its sealed

capsule it is unknown, rather brown, rather dirty. What’s more, their first friends are of the lowest

sort: bugs! Despite the grubbiness and the dimness, plants are not so vigilant about staying at an

arm’s length from their unfortunate neighbors. They deign to reach outwards towards the bugs,

not merely tolerating the must and grubs but welcoming them with roots stretched open. I think it

a shame–how dull, how reckless, how vulnerable they let themselves be!

Yet, plants, if you’ll grant my anthropomorphic thread, are somehow all the more

virtuous because of their vulnerability. Exiled from their shells, these sojourners of the soil, who

lean into their lowliness, display the sort of courage that opens them up to the “Your will be done

[in rather than] on earth as it is in heaven” They surrender the final word on their meaning, their

whole being and becoming to Him, “who raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from

the ash” (Psalm 113:7)

According to His Good Purpose, to which I am yet admitted access, He shepherds me

into valleys of which I cannot make heads or tails. By all accounts, these dark valleys have the

allure of an out, a counterargument to His Goodness, a rubber-stamp to tap-out because the

LORD on High sits far away on high and cares not. I am tempted to arrogantly presume the final

word on Who God is: the One Who forgot, Who will no longer make His face to shine upon me.

Fortunately, He is Judge and not I. So it is that His words count, whereas mine do not.

Though it is inconceivable to me, Israel’s only Saviour calls to us “Fear not, for I have redeemed

you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with

you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall

not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One

of Israel, your Savior. I give Cush and Seba in exchange for you. Because you are precious in my

eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, people in exchange for your life”

(Isa. 43:1-4). He reaches into our dimness and calls us His own, and He reminds us that He

hasn’t forgotten us, nor has He ever left us.

In the discursivity of the spatiotemporal hic et nunc, our vision is funnily myopic; it is

exactly delimited by the right now “here below on this side of the beyond” (Joseph Marechal

S.J.). Yet technological advances like the weather app often trick us into thinking that we can

and ought to know about the beyond. Hence, I find myself stulted by anxious loops, concerned

with the onwards and upwards. Plants, on the contrary, bracketing the anxieties about the

onwards upwards, persevere upwards by anchoring themselves downwards, welcoming their

lowliness. And yet, those same idiotically vulnerable seeds, so naively accepting of their lowly

estate, become forests and houses and churches.

We have trees and shrubs and flowers and fruits because we have seeds who have the

“courage to go the way He shepherds,” to enter into water and fire, to “fall into the earth and die”

(Bede Jarrett O.P.; Isa. 43; Jn. 12:24). Over and above this, we have trees and shrubs and

flowers and fruits because we have a God who is indeed abundant in steadfast love and whose

faithfulness does endure forever (Ps. 117). We might do well to attain to the virtue, so natural

among seeds, who when they are sure to say “the darkness covers me and the light about me is

night” still maintain the course and make room for God with whom “darkness is as light” to

show us that His will is our beatitude.