A Reflection for Tuesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
Jesus said, “What is the Kingdom of God like?
To what can I compare it?
It is like a mustard seed that a man took and planted in the garden.
When it was fully grown, it became a large bush
and the birds of the sky dwelt in its branches.”
When I showed up for college orientation, I was nervous—so nervous I almost felt sick. And yet, when anyone asked me how I was feeling, I insisted I was just excited. I’m sure my plastered-on smile and high-pitched voice weren’t particularly convincing.
At orientation’s opening Mass, I read through the program and encountered a prayer that was new to me: “Patient Trust” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. The whole thing is worth a read, but I’ll share the first few lines here:
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.”
Needless to say, it hit me where it hurt, but in a good way. If God’s work in my life during this transition was going to be slow, was I going to feel like this, sick to my stomach with nerves, for a long time? Were the fruits of God’s work going to be worth it on the other side?
This is the part of today’s Gospel message I’m sitting with today. The idea that something as small as a mustard seed can grow into a thriving plant, one that can be a home to the creatures of the earth, is a beautiful one. How profound that the Kingdom of God resembles this. But one absolutely necessary ingredient for growth is time. In the time between the seed stage and the plant stage, the stretching and the tending can be uncomfortable.
What I love so much about Teilhard de Chardin’s prayer and its intersection with today’s Gospel is that it takes oft-uttered maxims—just trust God, just trust the process—and gets underneath them. It’s not just an order to be patient and trust; it’s a reflection on what’s happening, what God is doing, while we let time, or as the author describes it, “grace and circumstances acting on your own good will,” do what it does. The prayer isn’t asking us to trust in God “just because.” It urges us to do so because in the messy middle of time, something good is happening to us underneath the surface—increment by increment.
Three years later, during the summer before my senior year, I worked as an orientation leader for the incoming first-year class, guiding new students through the same programming I had so tentatively walked through when I arrived on campus. I asked them: “Are you excited or nervous or both?” Almost always, they put on a brave face and told me they were excited; in their reactions, in the overly eager smiles and the too-quick responses, I recognized my freshman self. “That’s great!” I would tell them. “When I was in your shoes, I was excited, but mostly I felt nervous.” At that admission, most of them would relax their shoulders and tell me that they were, in fact, a bit terrified. Now that they knew I was a safe person, one who could see through their act because I understood it personally, they could share the truth with me.
When grace works underneath our fear, we grow the branches of connection, ones that others can rest in when they too experience fear or anxiety or low moments. But most of the time that takes weeks, months, even years. When I connected with the nervous underclassmen, I recognized the work God had been doing in my life, making me braver and more willing to be vulnerable, but it had taken basically my whole college career. Those “intermediate stages” that the prayer describes, though? They were fun. They were meaningful. And I’m so glad I couldn’t have rushed through or skipped them if I tried.
