Above: Window from Chartres Cathedral in France. Photo by Father Lawrence Lew, O.P.
So often we’ve heard sayings like, “All living things must change,” and, “To grow is to change.” This folk wisdom contains the seed of what we encounter in its full flowering in today’s Gospel: to change as we ought is to do the Father’s will. But this change is difficult. St. Dominic tells us the secret behind the ability to change: humility. "Guard humility," he often said. We see the humility of the first son in the Gospel. He recognized that he was being self-centered and lazy and that he ought to go to the vineyard. So, he went.
The Lord is ever calling us also to work in the vineyard – the vineyard of our own souls and the vineyard of the souls of others, so that all may be gathered together for the glory of His Kingdom. But how often we find this work distasteful, especially when it comes to the vineyard of our own souls. There is the pruning and the manuring, both of which can take many forms: admitting that we are wrong about something; having to work with someone very different from us in personality and approach; working out misunderstandings through patience and love; surrendering our own ideas and our own way; accepting our own weaknesses and shortcomings (the measure of our acceptance of others’ weaknesses and shortcomings); accepting difficulties, injustices, and even physical sufferings.
To do all of this work and to accept it with humility and love is pleasing to the Father. By this work in the vineyard, we begin already here on earth to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and its joyous freedom. For, as the folk-saying also knows, “the pain of today becomes the strength of tomorrow.” And, as St. Faustina says, "Satan defeats the proud and the arrogant, but the humble are strong."
St. Dominic, Burning as a torch for the salvation of sinners, pray for us.
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