If you recall, two weeks ago, Father Brian Joyce gave a homily in which he listed the "Ten Commandments of Forgiveness." And I'm sure you've got them memorized. But, in case you forgot, the Seventh Commandment is "Forgiveness allows a person who has offended us to start over."..... Forgiveness allows a person who has offended us to start over.

In the parable of the barren fig tree, which we have just heard, Jesus tells how God deals with human weakness, imperfection and failing. God is portrayed as the cultivating gardener, the solicitous gardener who tends the ailing fig tree. God is shown as patient. God gives us time to become the men and women that God created us to be. For some people, that takes years. For some others, it takes decades of their lives. I'd hazard to say that, for most of us, it takes our whole lifetime.

I'd like to share with you today the examples of three twentieth century Catholics to show how God was patient with them and gave them the time they needed to develop into the people that we know today. The first one is Dorothy Day.... Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Dorothy Day went through a series of lovers early in her life. She became pregnant by one of them and had an abortion. A while later, she got married, but the marriage didn't last. After one year, it broke up. Dorothy then took another lover and became pregnant, but, this time, decided to keep her child. Not a very promising beginning for someone who is now, today, being promoted for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. She is not a saint, declared by the Church, but there is strong consideration for doing so because God was patient with her and gave her time to do what she had to do to move on.

A second example is Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador in the late '70's, early 1980's. Oscar Romero was elected to be bishop of El Salvador for one primary reason, and that was that everybody thought that he would not "rock the boat," that he would settle for the status quo in his country. But when Archbishop Romero started to look around in the capital of San Salvador and in the outlying areas of the country, what he saw was rich, powerful Catholics oppressing poor, powerless Catholics. And Archbishop Romero took the position of the poor. He championed the cause of the poor. And,for that, he was murdered at the altar while he was saying Mass. But God had to let Romero go through that period of being a mousey book-worm that was afraid to do anything that would ruffle anybody's feathers to grow to the point where he really saw, with unclouded eyes, the evil that was all around him.

My third example is a woman that you might not be familiar with, but who is a famous Catholic writer of the middle of the twentieth century. Her name is Caryll Houselander. Caryll Houselander lived in England and was in London throughout the bombings of the Second World War. Now, in her earlier life, in the 20's and the 1930's, Caryll left the Church. One day, she went to Sunday Mass and sat in somebody else's pew. (You know how people stake out the territory. Well, it was even more rigid in the Church in those days. You actually paid for your pew.) And when Caryll would not leave that pew, the ushers came and dragged her out of Church. And she said, "I will never come back. Forget it. You will never see me here again." And I say, "Good for her!" But that wasn't the end of Caryll. Those who knew her say that Caryll Houselander liked to swear. She told off-color jokes, and she fell in love with a Russian spy, a shady character named Sidney Riley, who was actually a double agent. (But that could be a whole other talk.) And Sidney Riley, being the kind of guy he was, ran off with another woman a year later and broke Caryll's heart. And she carried that wound, her autobiography says, for the rest of her life. She never really got over that. But the Caryll Houselander that we know today is the one who became a poet and a mystic and a spiritual writer. And fifty years after her death, people in this year of 2001 are still publishing books about her spiritual path. This one is Joyce Kemp's "The Spiritual Path of Caryll Houselander." And there's another one that came out earlier about her advent writings, about the season of Advent. Wonderful, beautiful, beautiful woman!

God, in every one of these cases, had to let these people go through their lives, make their mistakes.... And God was patient. God was the gardener, cultivating those lives because God hoped, God knew that they would respond to His love by doing great things. Now, unless we understand God's patience for our weakness and our failure, we can never take this parable of the barren fig tree to the next level of meaning. There's a whole other side of meaning to the parable. And, it's this, that having been the recipients of God's patience in our own lives, we now need to be patient with other people. That's the call of the parable.

Our Lenten theme is "The Many Faces of Forgiveness." If you look on the front of your bulletin, you'll see that.... The Many Faces of Forgiveness. Well, who are the people who belong to those faces in our lives? Who are the difficult people? To carry out the parable image, who are the barren fig trees in our backyard? It could be a spouse. It could be a brother or sister. It could be a teacher, could be a boss, an employee or fellow-worker, that difficult person that is sort of a thorn in our side every day. Who are they? Remember that that Seventh Commandment of Forgiveness is "Forgiveness allows a person who has offended us to start over again,".... to have a second chance, and a third, and a fourth. So, as we reflect on the parable, who comes to mind as the unresponsive fig tree in our yard? Who is it who needs and deserves another chance today to respond to that loving cultivation that God is performing every single day that we live? Who is that person?