Mercy and justice, love and judgment: God holds together what for human beings can frequently be extremes. We also hear this week from Saint Paul about the Holy Spirit and prayer, and in the gospel more parables about the kingdom of God.

Here’s my latest idea for our T-shirt-and-bumper-sticker culture: “Those who are just must be kind.” OK, it’s not my idea; the Wisdom writer came up with it first.

Weeds is the name of a movie from the mid-1980s about a San Quentin prisoner, played by Nick Nolte, facing a life sentence without parole. After trying to kill himself several times, he resigns himself to his fate and checks a book out of the prison library to pass the time. 

In the film Il Postino, a humble postman on an Italian island discovers that the famous Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, is spending time there. The postman contrives to become the poet’s personal mailman just to be near him and to learn how to make poems that will help win his beloved’s heart.

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

The possibility [exists] that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth—love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn’t flowers grow out of dirt?