Da Bag

Around ten years ago, when I served a year with NET Ministries of Canada, I heard a homily given by a young priest from Newfoundland. The homily was given at a mass during our training period when we were filled with zeal for, and dare I say, pride of the mission upon which we were about to embark.
He admonished us.
His words: "Just be da bag." He really was a Newfie and thus his th's came out a little like those of our eldest son.

He was trying to tell us that, as we went out that year into schools, parishes and homes "preaching the Gospel", we had to constantly remember that we were no more than bags that carry the seed sown by the Master.
He was trying to tell us to be small, humble and dependent upon God who was doing the real work. His words have remained with me throughout the past ten years.

When I first heard "da bag" sermon I thought, with a 21-year-old swagger in my voice,

"I am that bag. I am the bag. I am better than all the other bags..."

You get the point?

My thoughts since have been tempered by marriage (a mirror to the soul), babies, poopy bums, hiddenness, sleepless nights, insomnia, hypochondria and the list goes on.
I think that I can now say with a little more humility,

"I am a bag. One among many; but I am a bag and the Lord can choose to use me if He wants. Even if I don't know about it. Actually, better if I don't know about it."

All this thinking about seed bags made me think about seed drills - something I couldn't have done as a 21 year old who had not yet married a farm boy who would kindly instruct her in seed drills and other farming implements.
But, for the agriculturally uninitiated, a seed drill is a really large, mechanised version of a seed bag.

I was pondering seed drills because, number one, I am longing for spring and, number two, I realised that seed drills get used but once a year and for a very short time - maybe just a few days. Dave informs me that, after their use, seed drills must be scrupulously cleaned and maintained or they will seize up and be useless when it come times for them to be used again. But, for the short time that they are used, they yield an incredible harvest.
In fact, there would be no yield, no harvest without them.

So, to what greater thought do these convoluted ones lead?

Well, we have a marriage preparation weekend coming up starting on Friday and, like those seed drills, Dave and I are being pulled put of the shed to sow some seed.
I hope.

Most couples arriving at marriage prep come because it's something they've "gotta do": the "Catholic classes" they have to attend in order to get married in the Church they no longer attend.
And I am not trying to be facetious. This is a hard audience.

We stand before them for 2.5 days proposing a radically different way of looking at life and living that life. Our greatest words are our lives that hopefully bear witness to the joy that comes with a life lived swimming upstream.

We present the hard truths: no wagging of fingers, no admonishments, no condescension. Just proposals to be considered by the hearers. We speak freely about the why behind Church teaching on contraception, cohabitation, sex before marriage, pornography and, if you can think of a hard sex-related topic, then we have probably covered it.
95% of our audience are already living together, sometimes for years, their lives so intertwined by mortgages and car payments that a period of abstinence is literally unthinkable.
But we still propose it.
We stand together (and in this case with a baby on one hip) to suggest that the zeitgeist of "live together, buy the house and the car, establish the career, get engaged and then get married" doesn't lead to happily ever after.

If anything, the divorce statistics bear witness to that.

But nobody wants to think of themselves as a statistic.

Nevertheless, 1 out of 2 couples divorce and we challenge our audience to ask why. More so, to ask themselves, each other and us how they can be the married couples left standing together when the end comes.

Our answers are hard, challenging and, to many ears, outdated.
But, they work. And so we can't leave them unspoken.
We don't adhere to the "get with the times" challenge of the secular world.
Because the times aren't always what they're cracked up to be.
And I think that the young couples of today are starting to smell that the culture in which they live is a little fishy, if not rancid.

And so it happens that, by the grace of God alone, some couples who come to these marriage prep weekends as a concession to their fiancee, priest or parents find the courage to approach us at the end to say things like:

"I didn't want to come to what I thought would be a waste of time. I leave understanding what it is to be a real man."

Some let what is said go in one ear and out the other; but who knows if one of those seeds might lodge somewhere between those two ears and bear fruit years from now during a time of crisis and disillusionment.

We are throwing out life preservers to a generation that has been left to drown in a sea of untruth, materialism and relativity. I am always astonished when some of those couples grab hold and say:

"Why have we never heard this before? Why didn't I know this before I screwed up? Why did no one think that we could live up to these challenges instead of giving us mediocrity?"

As our bishop remarked to me after one such weekend, "Why am I surprised when people are attracted to the Gospel for which they were created?"

It is an awesome thing to be trusted to speak about these soul-saving, marriage-preserving, love-rescuing truths.
Hard truths that rub the wrong way.

So, these two seed bags are asking for prayers for the two upcoming weekends.
That we can just be bags. That we don't get in the way of God.
And, on a practical note, that the family stays healthy and that Isaac makes his way peacefully through long days away from home. (And for our babysitters who get to really live the culture of life for two Saturdays.)
Thanking you in advance.