"You have crowned the year with your bounty,
and your paths overflow with a rich harvest;
The untilled meadows overflow with it,
and rejoicing clothes the hills.
The fields are garmented with flocks
and the valleys blanketed with grain.
They shout and sing for joy."
Because of God's generosity, there is room for everyone in the Kingdom. The poor have enough; so poverty disappears. Meanwhile, the formerly super-rich have only their due share of the 1/7 billionth part of the world's product that rightfully belongs to everyone.
To repeat: abundance for all is the way of Nature -- the way of God.
Only a syndrome of denial -- willful blindness and deafness -- enables the rich and powerful to continue their exploitation. Jesus describes the process clearly in today's final reading. He says:
"They look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.
Isaiah's prophecy is fulfilled in them, which says:
You shall indeed hear but not understand,
you shall indeed look but never see.
Gross is the heart of this people,
they will hardly hear with their ears,
they have closed their eyes,
lest they see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their hearts and be converted,
and I heal them."
Those of us striving to follow Jesus' Way hear his call to open our eyes and ears. Conversion -- deep change at the personal and social levels -- is our shared vocation. That's the only way to bring in God's Kingdom. Individually our efforts might be as small and insignificant as tiny seeds. But those seeds can be powerful if aligned with the forces of Nature and the Kingdom of God. That's true even if much of what we sow falls on rocky ground, are trampled underfoot, eaten by birds or are choked by thorns. We never know which seeds will come to fruition.
Such realization means:
" Lowering expectations about results from our individual acts in favor of the Kingdom.
" Nonetheless deepening our faith and hope in the inevitability of the Kingdom's coming as the result of innumerable small acts that coalesce with similar acts performed by others.
Once again, Pete Seeger expressed it best:
"Imagine a big seesaw. One end of the seesaw is on the ground because it has a big basket half full of rocks in it. The other end of the seesaw is up in the air because it's got a basket one quarter full of sand. Some of us have teaspoons and we are trying to fill it up. Most people are scoffing at us. They say, 'People like you have been trying for thousands of years, but it is leaking out of that basket as fast as you are putting it in.' Our answer is that we are getting more people with teaspoons every day. And we believe that one of these days or years -- who knows -- that basket of sand is going to be so full that you are going to see that whole seesaw going zoop! in the other direction. Then people are going to say, 'How did it happen so suddenly?' And we answer, 'Us and our little teaspoons over thousands of years.'"
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