A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Our lord said to the crowds, the reign of god is also like a dragnet thrown out into the lake, which collected all sorts of things. When it was full, they hauled it ashore and sat down to put what was worthwhile, that is fish, into containers. And what they found useless, they threw away. That, our lord continues, is how it will be at the end of the world.
Angels will go out, and they will separate the wicked from the just and hurl the wicked into the fiery furnace where they will wail and grind their teeth. Have you understood this? Our lord asked. Yes, they answered. To which he replied, every scribe who is learned in the reign of god is like the head of a household, who can bring from his storeroom both the new and the old.
When Jesus had finished this parable, he moved on out of that district, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Last Sunday, in the course of my well chosen remarks, I referred rather at some length because it was very much part of those remarks, to the horrible massacre in that McDonald's fast food emporium in the little town of San Isidro, which is close to San Diego, in the great state of California. Subsequently, I received from one from a gentleman who was in the congregation a brief note referring to that massacre, and giving me a quotation from the yearbook of one of the young girls who was murdered.
She was 18 years old and had graduated from high school last June. Her name was Margarita Padilla. Padilla no means a little oven or a frying pan. Anyway, Margarita Padilla had inscribed in her yearbook the following sentence. We have to blossom where God plants us.
Now if anything summarizes and is coincidental to my remarks of the last two days about Saint Ignatius Loyola and about Saint Alphantus Liguria, that little sentence from that poor girl whose life was cut off at 18, just a few weeks after her graduation. But she wrote this months ago, that we have to blossom blossom where God plants us. Doesn't mean we stay there, but we have to blossom where we are, not where we are not, or under circumstances which don't exist, or under what we think would be ideal, conditions. We have to blossom. Notice he says blossom, to bloom, to put out flowers.
And you know there's no fruit unless you have a blossom. This is a, I think, wonderful, tremendous statement from a young girl, because you know some of the flipping stuff you see in yearbooks. Well, this is what she wrote, we have to blossom where God plants us. In other words, it's not that we our lives are just haphazard, that we just find ourselves willy nilly in some kind of an awkward situation or embarrassing situation or a situation which we think is tragic and hopeless, and that there's nothing we can do about it. Now we all feel this way.
There's nothing wrong about feeling that way. We're human. And I constantly go back, Christ felt that way in the garden of Gethsemane. So you're no better than Christ. I'm no better than Christ.
So let's admit it. When we face up to these situations which are we aren't for us tragic and hopeless and unfortunate, embarrassing, and inconvenient and all the rest. They are in many instances. Yet, the truth is, if we're going to blossom at all, we have to blossom where God plants us. That's what the young lady wrote in her yearbook.
When she wrote that, she had no idea how short her life was going to be, or that that sentence was going to be quoted some morning in Garrett Park. She probably never heard of this nuclear free area. This is but this absolutely summarizes what I drew what I draw out of reading the lives of the saints, all of them, without exception, without exception. And remember, we are all called upon to be saints. Don't run away.
Don't don't be don't recoil from the thought. Because unless we are called to be saint, you know where we're gonna be? We are going to be among the the garbage which that net hauled in, and which our Lord says is going to be cast out into a fiery furnace. Notice this is you see, we read this stuff as I say it. It's it's it's really awful breaking the text up morning after morning this way.
Because in this instance, we have after parable where our blessed lord is using metaphors about the kingdom of god, one after the other. And they all have this this theme in it that you're that the just are saved and the unjust, the evil are lost. And we can go either way. And the way we're going to go is one of the things that this life determines. How what do we do with this life?
Did you notice that opening prayer this morning? That we beg and pray God that we may use wisely, use wisely what he has given us. Because we have to use the creatures of God. And the problem is the creatures of God can separate us from God because we can lose ourselves in his creatures so easily. We can lose ourselves in our God given responsibilities.
We can forget God. It's easily done. Unless we make an effort, we're going to forget it. And remember, the opening sentence was that without God, we can do simply nothing in the way of holiness. Just think of that.
Let's not be Pelagians. Saint Augustine had trouble with them, you know. But let's come back to this, that we have our contribution to make. And as Newman most eloquently in a very famous passage points out, and unless we do it, it won't be done. And unless we do it, my salvation may be in jeopardy.
So we have to use this life. We can't just get sit in the automobile and say, God, you take over, I'm just a passenger here. You cannot do that. Alcoholics Anonymous, has a phrase, let go, let God. Well, there's a lot of truth in that, and that's addressed to alcoholics.
But you see, it's not absolutely true. We cannot let go and let God because we have our role to play. We have to blossom where God has planted us, where God has planted us today, 08/02/1984. Not yesterday and not tomorrow. Today.
Today. That's a wonderful sentence that young woman wrote. How little she thought her life was going to be so ended, brutally, and suddenly. I don't suppose Well, this is this is just a fatuous opinion, and that's all I'm giving it for. But in my little old experience with education, and and the students who are supposed to be victims of the system, I don't think there's anything that matches the expectations of high school graduates.
To me, I always loved teaching freshmen and the undergraduates because they you know, the world was open to them. They weren't cynical. They weren't thinking of the paycheck. They weren't thinking of retirement. I'm not exaggerating this.
You deal with graduate students and they they haven't let gotten their they haven't gotten their degree yet, and they wanna know what the terms of the retirement plan is for the firm they wanna work for. But that you see, there's something ebullient, something alive, something vital, something questioning among the younger when they're entering into the academic world. And I and the seniors of high school have it to a great extent. The whole of life is opening. Of course, the physical, the romantic side is opening too.
I'm aware of that. But it all coalesces to make a high school graduate a wonderful person. And it's a time that graduation which comes in June for high school graduates, they'll never they'll never have anything like in their life. Maybe a wedding or something like that, their own marriage will be the closest they come to it. But I wanna come back to the idea that here, you can imagine all that she had in mind.
Anyone who could write that sentence was a thoughtful person. They had a philosophy of life already that was as sound as anything could be. And she said it in a way that Ignatius said it with his life, Alfonso Luguri said it with his life, every saint has said it with this their his or her life. And if we're to be saints, we have to say it with our lives, our lives of today. We must blossom where God has planted us.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.