Suggested Emphasis
“Dismiss all anxiety from your minds…then will the God of peace be with you.”
Salesian Perspective
The image of a vineyard is employed in the first and third readings from today's lectionary. In both cases, things in the vineyard haven't turned out quite the way that the owner had planned: it seems that the people responsible for caring for the vineyard in the first place didn’t live up to expectations.
Who owns the vineyard? God does, of course. What is the vineyard? It is the world in which we live. It is the world of relationships among us. It is the world – as Francis says, the universe – within us. Who is responsible for the upkeep of the vineyard? We are…as individuals and as community.
The truth is that we don't always live up to God's expectations, either. As collaborators with God in God’s ongoing plan of creation, redemption, inspiration and salvation, we don't always harvest the grapes of life in ways that give life: things like respect, honesty, purity, decency or virtue that we should. Sadly, we often use our energies in producing grapes of wrath: things like jealousy, envy, indifference, hatred, violence and injustice.
This is our lot in life. We clearly know the kind of vineyard that God wants us to cultivate and grow, but sin, fear, and selfishness often prevent us from producing the kinds of fruit that give life.
As tragic as this reality is, however, only one thing can actually make things worse.
Being anxious about it.
Francis de Sales wrote: “With the single exception of sin, anxiety is the greatest evil that can happen to a soul.” Why? “Instead of removing the evil, anxiety increases it and involves the soul in great anguish and distress together with such loss of strength and courage that it imagines the evil to be incurable……all this is extremely dangerous.” (Introduction to the Devout Life, Part IV, Chapter 11)
We need to be honest. We need to identify those areas of our lives - our thoughts, feelings, attitudes and actions - in which we experience difficulty in cultivating a harvest of peace, justice, reconciliation and love. But we need to do this without anxiety because anxiety both weakens our ability to turn away from sin and robs us of the courage we need to do what is right and good.
By all means acknowledge the reality of sin and the shortcomings in your life, but dedicate more of your energies to living “according to what you have learned and accepted……then, the God of peace will be with you.”
Strive each day to produce a harvest of love from the vineyard of life…but avoid anxiety in the process.
