Hearth & Altar

Today closes the Ember Days your family has kept this week - Wednesday, Friday, and now Saturday - and it does so with a pair of readings that were made for each other. Paul answers a question about the resurrection with an image any child who has planted a garden already understands: what you sow does not come to life unless it dies first. A bare kernel goes into the ground, and something unrecognizably more comes back up. Then the Gospel gives Jesus's own parable about seed - the sower who scatters it everywhere, on the path, on rock, among thorns, and finally on good soil that produces a hundredfold.

Put those two readings side by side and today is entirely about what happens to something small and hidden before it becomes something large and visible. That is true of a seed in the ground. It was true of Christ in the tomb. And it has been true of the fast your family kept this week - small, mostly invisible, three days that will not show up anywhere except in what they quietly formed in your household.

Ember Saturday carries an old tradition. For centuries, this was the day the Church ordained new priests, after an all-night vigil that ran straight through until dawn - a harvest and an ordination are the same kind of event - something planted long before, in the dark, finally becoming visible.

• For our family, that the small, hidden things we have done this week would grow into something we cannot yet see, we pray to the Lord.
• For seminarians and men discerning the priesthood or diaconate in our diocese, that they would be given good soil to grow in, we pray to the Lord.
• For our own parish priests, that the seed planted at their ordination would keep bearing fruit, we pray to the Lord.
• As the Ember Days close, for the grace to keep the harvest-thanksgiving spirit of today even after the fasting ends, we pray to the Lord.

At dinner, ask each person which of the four soils in today's Gospel describes them best this week - the path, the rock, the thorns, or the good soil - and why. Then pray by name for one priest, deacon, or seminarian your family knows.

This is a good night to actually plant something, even if it is late in the season for your climate - a bulb, a seed in a small pot on a windowsill, anything that will visibly go into the dark and eventually come up. Let your children bury it themselves. Tell them that is exactly the picture Paul used to explain what happens to a body at death: it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.

If your family has kept any part of this week's Ember fast, tonight is the night to name what you actually noticed - not what you accomplished, just what you noticed. Hunger, patience, a short temper, a moment of unexpected gratitude. The harvest of a fast is rarely dramatic. It is usually just this: knowing yourself slightly better than you did on Wednesday.