The Size of a Mustard Seed

We hope you all have been doing well. We have some important announcements that we plan to make in the coming weeks. But before we do that, we would like to share with you some reflections and art from our recent annual silent that we made at Our Lady of Peace retreat house. (We are so grateful to the The Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows for their hospitality and care as we entered into an important time of discernment and prayer!)

We have had a lot to pray with; it has been quite a year. Our first year of ministry. Our first full year as a private association. Our first year of private vows. So many firsts. 

As many of you know, we began our ministry in January by telling our own stories of abuse in The Pillar. As consecrated women dedicated to reaching those on the fringes of the Church, especially those who have been wounded or abused by members of the Church, we spoke publicly to protect others and to witness to the power of the Gospel amid darkness. As is common for so many who share their stories publicly, our lives were impacted in a profound way by this decision. At the same time, we remain emboldened in our mission and firm in the belief that the Lord wants this ministry in the Church. 

Our annual 8-day silent retreat this June provided us with an opportunity to bring all that has happened over this past year to the Lord and ask him how he wanted us to move forward.

As we prayed with all that the Lord has revealed to us in this past year of our ministry, the image of the mustard seed came to us. Such a tiny seed can seem so fragile and vulnerable to being overcome by the elements. Surely some of you can relate to feeling like you can so easily be crushed or misunderstood amid your littleness. We have felt this way recently. It can be easy to become overwhelmed or discouraged by our own weakness and by the sin and darkness in the Church. But our time with Jesus in our annual retreat reminded us that this is precisely where God wants us to be. Because this is where God is present to us and where his grace is active and alive.

In the present reality of our smallness, the potential of God's creative action encircles us. He waits for our fiat of faith, for our consent to be rooted in him. To be radical followers of Jesus means just that. He does not want us to pretend we are more than we are; he wants us to embrace our weakness so that we may embrace his transcendence. 

Facing the reality that we are weak and small can be scary. So much is unknown and out of our control. But hope is a gift from God that arises from within contexts of fear, abandonment, and disillusionment. Hope helps us to remain resolute when our own strength fails and the grace of the Holy Spirit alone sustains us.

As the protagonist of our lives, God invites us relentlessly into his gentle grandeur of power and love. When we stand in solidarity with all that is small and vulnerable within us and in others, we honor the reality that we need our mighty God. In this act of faith, we recognize that God is truly good and faithful; he desires to protect and provide for us. This is the climate of beauty. Beauty takes us beyond the shell of our mustard seed into new life and the mystery of God.

The Heart and the Mustard Tree

Reality is always far bigger than us. We cannot control it. We cannot imbibe all it has to give us. No matter our IQ, we can never understand it all.

This applies also to abuse in the Church. We continue to believe that we cannot hope to begin to address the wounds in the Church if we do not face the reality of the magnitude of the problem we are seeking to treat. As Pope Francis has said, we need to “come to grips with this reality [of abuse] in a comprehensive and communal way.” But this can also seem like an impossible task. And it is, if we approach it as individuals who think we can control, orchestrate, and completely understand. Instead, as we have prayed with how the Lord is asking us to move forward, we believe that facing these wounds requires from us something that we, like many people, find very difficult—embracing our littleness. 

God only asks of us a mustard seed of faith (Mt 17:20-21). 

But that tiny mustard seed can seem monumental when we use whatever privilege and power we have in life to cloak our vulnerabilities, to hide them, to “heal” them, and to tidy up our messiness before we think of presenting it before God and others. If we’re not careful, we could spend all our lives living in this way, in a way that suggests to ourselves and to others that we do not need much else than our own self sufficiency. We must do this because we are afraid of our littleness.

But amid this fear, the resounding message from Jesus in our retreat was that our weakness and smallness is the only way to face what is real—in ourselves, in our Church and in our world.

If we allow ourselves to live our size, to be small enough, we can face any reality, even the darkest ones, from the Heart of Jesus.

This is our hope.