Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

A man plants a vineyard and does everything first. He clears the stones, chooses the best vines, builds a tower, digs a press before there is any wine to press. Only after all of that does he lease it to tenants and go away. Isaiah sings this as a love song, and by the end of it the song turns bitter, because the vineyard, tended perfectly, gives wild grapes instead of good ones.

You have been a tenant of something for a long time now, a family, a parish, a trade you worked at for decades. None of it started with you. Somebody cleared the stones before you arrived. The examen this month, four weeks of it starting tonight, asks what you have actually done with what was handed to you, not as an accusation, but as an honest accounting a person your age has more standing to make than most.

Isaiah's bitterness deserves attention too, though. The owner did nothing wrong and still got a bad harvest. That happens in a life too. Children raised with real love do not always turn out the way you hoped. Effort does not always produce what it deserves. The reading does not pretend otherwise, and neither should you, on a night like tonight when the accounting is just beginning.

Paul's second reading gives the frame to hold while the examen runs its course this month: have no anxiety at all, and let your requests be made known with thanksgiving first. Whatever these four weeks turn up, start from what you were given before you start counting what you produced with it.