This last section, which we took from the handbook, approaches the True Devotion to Our Lady in a transactional sense. It seeks to portray to the eyes of our hearts both what the sacrifice, which we offer, consists of, but also the return on investment, which we may expect from investing such spiritual capital with the Mother of God. None of this is particularly surprising. After all, the premier devotion associated with the Most Holy Mother of God, the Holy Rosary, takes the form of handling what seems to be just a few seeds (in Old Slavonic, as in many other languages, beads are called "seeds," as if to remind us of the natural fact that small seeds often grow into very formidable trees. The seed of the mighty sequoia, for example, North America's largest tree, is quite small, no bigger than the bead of a large rosary.) The Lord Jesus too talks of seeds, reminding us that they must "fall into the earth and die" in order to produce any fruit, and the Holy Apostle Paul completes the seed imagery, when he tells us that our bodies are like seeds. The earthly body will be sown in the earth, but the one that comes up from the earth will be a heavenly body. We don't even know what a heavenly body is, but we do know that it grows from this earthly seed.
One of the most important and elementary gardening lessons is not to be stingy with seed. As St. Paul reminds us, "the one who sows sparingly also reaps sparingly." Sowing has to be accompanied by generosity. If it happens that the plants are too close together after germination, one can always thin and spread them, but sowing with generosity protects the sower from the possibility that some of the seed may not germinate.
In a similar vein, in the spiritual life it behooves us to sow a lot of seed. It is fortunate that we have the powerful devotion of the rosary, because it forces us to look upon our prayers as the seeds of mighty things that may grow. And we have plenty of examples from history that prove that this is indeed the case. The rosary is recorded to have destroyed entire fleets and armies that were arrayed against the people of God. How much more can we guess that such is the case in the invisible world as we have observed in the physical one: even greater armies of demons must have routed by... seeds.
In the True Devotion to Our Lady, we give everything over into her hands– absolutely everything. Nevertheless, we still need to sow a lot. It is true, we no longer have our own farm, where we grow our own crops. We now work on the Mother of God's farm and sow and reap for her. Now, it is all the more true that we have to sow a lot. In this case, the holy rosary is like an illustration of all of life. In the same way that we come to see our prayers as seeds, so we also learn, by extension, to see our virtues and deeds as tiny, mean little seeds– small indeed, but God is able to make them grow into something great through the intercession of the Mother of God for His own glory, not for ours. When the worker works hard but is detached from exerting any kind of ownership over the produce of his work, great things result for God's glory, as we see in today's reading: five loaves and two fish became twelve baskets of edible fragments. The holy rosary, taken as an emblem of this True Devotion, is complete inversion of communism. In communism, the workers seek to exert their ownership over the means of production. In our devotion, on the other hand, we give everything away, in order to work as slaves on the estate of our Lord and our Lady. Not even the seeds are our own, and what grows from them is certainly not our own, but God recognizes our tiny role in the growing, and He rewards it with the generosity that can only be exercised by an Infinite Being.
We need to sow as much as we can. It will endear us to God. Among the workers of the vineyard, may we work the hardest, sow the most and be noticed the least, because the hundredfold awaits us at the time of the harvest.
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