Seed and Soil

Parables are filled with imagery that is good for the soul. When thinking about how to go about creating artwork that speaks truth through symbol and image, looking to the Gospels is a powerful resource. 

Marcus Grodi, host of The Journey Home on EWTN, wrote a book called "Life from Our Land: The Search for a Simpler Life in a Complex World." In it he tells personal stories of how his family learned to work an inherited land in the mostly wooded, clay bed, foothill country of the Appalachian mountains. He grew up a city boy and though he and his family knew very little about how to make the land productive, they researched and learned what they had been given. His book ties together spiritual lessons with a growing understanding of the physical earth placed in their care. 

One of the chapters in Grodi's book is titled "Stewardship" and delves into the job we've been given as humans to take care of the earth. He uses the parable of the sower and the different soils in which his seed was sown to illustrate how we (soil) receive the Word (seed) that is given to us. (Matthew 13) These powerful images are ones that strike the reader as easy to understand while having many complex thinking points about the relationships between the Sower, the seed, the soil and one's spiritual journey. 


"Winter Fields" 
3"x 6" Encaustic painting
2020

"I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself."  ~ Aslan in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew

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