Sometimes I don’t feel like the rich soil

A Reflection for Friday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

A word that isn’t used nearly enough is petrichor, the smell produced when rain falls on dry soil.

Growing up in Southeast Asia, where it torrentially rains about once a day, the smell of petrichor grew to feel like home. Now, living in the United States, where it rains less often, the smell of rain still takes me back to lazy childhood Sunday afternoons when I left the window open to take in the sound of the downpour and the smell of petrichor.

So when I read today’s Gospel, I want to be the rich, fragrant soil. But the truth is, most days, I don’t feel like the rich soil. Sometimes, I sit in Mass and hear the readings without really listening. Sometimes, I receive the Eucharist and try my best to feel some kind of spiritual warmth and connectedness, but all I feel is that another minute of my life has passed.

It’s easy to judge our spiritual lives by their texture—by the epiphanies or conversion moments that make us feel God’s presence.

But rich soil doesn’t form overnight. It forms from dry rocks, from the activity of insects and plants that live in it.

It reminds me that even saints faced long periods of “spiritual dryness.” I always assumed that my confirmation saint, St. Teresa of Kolkata, commonly known as Mother Teresa, was constantly on fire with the feeling of God’s presence to carry out her ministry so tirelessly, but I recently learned that she went through a period of desolation where she did not feel God’s presence in her prayer life for 50 years.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit monk and modernist poet, also wrote of his struggles with insomnia and lack of spiritual consolation in his sonnet “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” where he laments that his prayers were like “dead letters.”

The metaphor he uses to describe his frustration strikes me: “Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours.” Hopkins did not feel like the rich soil—he felt like dull, unrisen dough soured from an uninspiring yeast.

But despite the textures of their spiritual lives feeling dry and unrequited, St. Teresa and Hopkins kept turning to God and praying. Despite the dry season, they tended to the soil.

Their endurance over decades reminds me of two things: First, becoming the rich soil that can sustain the seed of faith takes time—maybe even decades of being the dry, rocky soil targeted by birds and bugs. We need to spend time preparing and being open to the sower. And second, just as Hopkins’s poetic dough longed for a transplanted yeast to make it heartier, dry soil needs rain to become the rich and fragrant soil—the kind of help that can only come from above.

I am not the rich soil yet, but by persevering through the dryness and with God’s help, I can hope that someday, I might be.

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