Weeding out

WEEDS are a fact of life, and we just have to learn how to

deal with them. Not only are they in our gardens. They are practically

everywhere. They, in fact, appear in all aspects of our life—personal,

social, economic, political, etc.

            Where we have to be most careful about them is in our

spiritual life. That’s because a spiritual life full of weeds is the

seedbed of all the weeds we can have in all the other aspects of life.

The condition of our spiritual life determines the condition of all

the other areas in our life.

            We have to see to it, for example, that our prayer is a

real dialogue with God and not just a soliloquy, our sanctity not

sanctimony, our piety not pietism. We have to see to it that

everything in our spiritual life is genuine and authentic, not fake.

And to think that nowadays we are practically swimming in an ocean of

fake things!

            We have to flee from any signs of pretension and

hypocrisy. We have to strengthen our unity of life, always making an

effort to fix our often fractured life. We have to know how to

dominate the many distractions we are having nowadays in our prayer

life, and these can be very irresistible and, worse, addicting.

            This, of course, will require constant effort at

vigilance, discernment and weeding out. But first, we need to know how

to distinguish between the true and the false.

            This can be very tricky, because weeds can also have the

quality of looking like the genuine plants. But thanks to God, we also

have the means to be able to identify which is which.

            We already have well-defined doctrine of our faith, a good

variety of spiritualities to choose from, a rich body of testimonies

of saints who can serve as guides, and other means like recourse to

the sacraments, to spiritual direction, etc.

            We just have to do our part. Much like what we usually do

with our gardens, we also have to see to it that there is a regular

pruning and weeding out done in our acts of piety. This should be a

habit for us, something we do quite automatically.

            Christ himself referred to this when he said: “He cuts off

every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does

bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” (Jn 15,2)

            In our daily examination of conscience, we should be able

to make some cutting off and pruning. We cannot let some days pass

without doing this very important thing of cutting off, weeding out

and pruning. Especially days when we are confronted with a lot of

distractions, we should be quite active in doing this.

            This is the way we can manage to create an air of goodness

wherever we may be, edifying people around, which is what we should be

doing all the time. The end result should be a certain surge of

eagerness to do good always. We can notice a certain sense of

driven-ness in our life, and that’s simply because we are fit and

lean, cleansed from unnecessary burden.