By Sister Meredith, O.C.D.
We sisters have taken to gardening and weeding our Retreat House grounds to keep the campus beautiful and ready for when we open. This time has brought me back to when I used to weed our gardens at home every Saturday morning. As a teenager, I didn’t like it, but now, I’m seeing how our Lord is revealing a hint of His work in my soul during this pandemic.
We were all assigned a little area to cultivate and clean up and I was given the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes with St. Bernadette at her feet. There were many smaller weeds in this area, and I thought, great, this will be easy. Boy, was I wrong! I noticed that the bigger weeds are much easier to remove so long as you get down deep into the soil to remove the roots. But the little ones were everywhere and their roots were thin and breakable. If I pulled too hard or didn’t take the time to loosen the soil around it, I would simply snap off the head without taking care of the root.
God was showing me a reflection of my soul. Sure, maybe (please God), I’m not going around committing mortal sins, but the small venial sins like impatience or choosing not to do the better thing could happen daily and plant themselves all around me. This time of pandemic is really giving me pause to think: “Sister, what’s the better thing to do and why not do it now?” Could God be asking you the same thing? Could He be asking you to practice heroic virtue during this time of quarantine, the type of virtue that would make you a saint? Yes, I think God could very well be asking us to live as saints during this time. May it be so.