Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

A landowner does everything: clears the field, plants the vines, builds a watchtower, digs a wine press. Then he leases it out and waits for the harvest. Isaiah sings this as a love song about God and Israel, and Jesus tells nearly the same story to a room that isn't ready to hear it, because he's describing them.

Four weeks start today. From now until All Saints, the Church keeps circling one question: what's growing in the vineyard of your life? Before answering that, it helps to remember what Paul says just a few verses later in the second reading. Have no anxiety at all. Make your requests known with thanksgiving. Gratitude comes before any accounting, and it changes the whole tone of the accounting once it starts.

Isaiah's song has a hard turn in it too: the owner, after doing everything right, gets wild grapes instead of good ones, and decides to stop protecting the vineyard rather than keep pouring effort into ground that isn't producing. It's not a threat aimed at strangers. It's a real question about whether the care being poured into a life or a family is actually meeting anything, or just disappearing into ground that's stopped responding.

Tonight is a good night to start something small on purpose: a jar on the table where the family writes down, all month, whatever good you actually notice in each other.

• For the grace to notice the good in each other and say so out loud, we pray to the Lord.
• On this Respect Life Sunday, for every unborn child and every mother who's afraid, and for the closure of the abortion facility in our city, we pray to the Lord.
• For farmers and everyone who works the harvest this season, we pray to the Lord.
• For the grace to be thankful before we ask for anything else, we pray to the Lord.

Set an empty jar on the table tonight with a stack of small papers beside it. Explain the rule: any time this month someone notices something good in someone else, they write it down and drop it in. Nobody reads them yet, and nobody has to write one every single day.

This jar runs the whole month and gets opened on Halloween night, so there's no rush and no quota. Don't push anyone to fill it on a schedule. Some nights nobody will write anything, and that's fine. The point isn't volume. It's the habit of actually looking for what's good in the people you live with, instead of only noticing what's wrong or what needs fixing, which tends to be the easier habit for most families to fall into.

If a younger child can't write yet, let them dictate to an older sibling or draw a small picture instead, folded up the same as everyone else's slips so nobody can tell whose is whose just by looking.

Ask everyone tonight, before the jar goes out for the first time: what's one good thing you've noticed in this family lately that you've never actually said out loud? Let that be the very first slip.