The Painted Prayerbook

In the Weeds © Jan L. Richardson

Reading from the Gospels, Proper 11/Ordinary 16/Pentecost +5: Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

I’m lingering in Minnesota for a few days in the wake of a great retreat with the Saint Brigid’s community. As I was running some errands yesterday with my friend Mary, the founder of Saint Brigid’s, we passed some wheat fields—not a typical sight in my usual landscape. It was an interesting bit of convergence, given our gospel lection for the week. Matthew offers us a tale of wheat and weeds, with Jesus weaving these agrarian images into a parable about the kingdom of God.

Matthew lets us in on Jesus’ explanation of this parable, and it seems pretty straightforward at the surface. Jesus offers an interpretive equation in which, not surprisingly, wheat=good and weeds=bad. I’m curious, however, about how Jesus has the householder respond to the laborer who asks him whether they should gather the weeds. The householder tells him to allow the weeds and the wheat to grow together until harvest time, at which point the laborers will gather the weeds and burn them. Removing the weeds too soon would cause harm to the growing wheat.

Jesus’ parable has set me to pondering how weeds and wheat grow together in my own life. I have found myself thinking about my creative process, in particular the challenges that I experience as an artist and a writer. I’ve long been aware that part of my ongoing work is to cultivate practices that support the work. There is part of me that needs a measured rhythm of life—like orderly rows of wheat, say. Yet that orderly part of me regularly grapples with the part that needs a strand of something that’s a bit wilder, something less domesticated.

Something weedy.

I sometimes grow dismayed by what I allow to creep into my creative life: commitments that distract me, weariness, or plain old resistance to the process. Though being an artist and writer lies at the heart of who I am, I sometimes wrestle with how the work brings my inner self to the surface, confronting me with the raw, unformed stuff I carry around inside me. Some days it’s easier to let the weeds grow, as if they could provide a bit of wild shelter from the work of cultivating my interior crop.

My spiritual director has challenged me to think about the ways I see those times of distraction and discouragement, those occasions when I skirt the demands of the drafting table or the blank page in favor of something else. Where I have tended to view those times as wasteful, extraneous to what I’m supposed to be about in this world, she invites me to see them as part of the process, integral to the creative crop. There’s something about spending time among the weeds that serves to clarify my vision and sharpen my desire. Weeds don’t make for a steady diet, and eventually I get hungry for what will sustain and satisfy, and will do whatever is necessary to find my way to that sustenance. In the fullness of time, an interior apocalypse comes around: the weeds fall away, and burn in the fire that comes in times of focused creating. The longed-for crop flourishes, and feeds.

What’s growing in the landscape of your life? How do you discern the difference between the weeds and the wheat? What do you do with the weeds? How might they be part of the work of cultivating your landscape?

Blessings to you in the wild and weedy places.

[To use the “In the Weeds” image, please visit this page at janrichardsonimages.com. Your use of janrichardsonimages.com helps make the ministry of The Painted Prayerbook possible. Thank you!]

This entry was posted on July 15, 2008 at 4:01 PM and is filed under art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.