Lectio Divina — Day 17 of the Season of Creation
SINFUL
Living Water for All
Lectio — What is God saying to me?
> “Now there was a sinful woman in the city…”
— Luke 7:37
The word that catches me today is sinful.
It is an uncomfortable word, particularly when I have to put it before the word man and admit: I am a sinful man.
The woman enters the house already wearing the label. Everyone knows what she is. The Pharisee sees it. Jesus sees something more.
And perhaps the great difference between Simon and the woman is not that one is sinful and the other is not. It is that one knows he is sinful and the other does not.
Jesus says of the woman:
> “Her many sins have been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love.”
Perhaps the danger is not simply that I sin. Perhaps the greater danger is that I become so accustomed to my way of living that I can no longer recognize certain things as sin.
And then I have little need for forgiveness.
Little gratitude for mercy.
And, as Jesus warns, perhaps little love.
—
Meditatio — What is God saying in my life?
At The Glenn this time of year, the large windmill-shaped flowering heads of Windmill grass are appearing. I look at one and realize that it is doing something extraordinary without making the slightest fuss about it:
It is scattering seeds.
The wind catches them. Some will fall nearby. Others will travel farther than I will ever know.
And suddenly I wonder:
What seeds am I scattering?
I confess that I do not naturally think of myself as a sinful man.
And perhaps that is precisely the problem.
Saint Francis of Assisi helps me see that conversion cannot stop at the boundaries I have drawn around my spiritual life. If my relationship with the Creator is being converted, then my relationship with creation must be converted too. Pope Leo XIV has recently called the Season of Creation a summons to precisely this kind of “authentic ecological conversion,” one in which my encounter with Christ becomes visible in my relationship with the world around me.
That makes some uncomfortable questions unavoidable.
What about the plastic I consume and discard?
What about the water I waste?
What about buying things merely because I can?
What about treating convenience as though it were a necessity?
What about behaving as though the resources entrusted to me belong exclusively to me?
The Church’s language here is stronger than the language I am sometimes willing to use. A recent International Theological Commission document describes environmental wrongdoing in terms of sin against the Creator and creation, connecting ecological damage not merely with harm to nature but with rejection of God’s design for creation. This develops a theme Pope Francis had already made explicit: Christians can confess “sins against the Creator, against creation, and against our brothers and sisters,” including patterns such as unnecessary plastic use and wasting water.
So why do I sometimes feel silly mentioning such things in an examination of conscience?
Perhaps because I have learned to recognize certain sins while remaining almost blind to others.
Yet during this Season of Creation, living water makes the question particularly concrete. Water comes from the hose at The Glenn so easily that I can forget what it actually is: gift before commodity, creation before possession. This September, Pope Leo’s prayer intention specifically asks that water be safeguarded “with gratitude, justice, and responsibility,” while rejecting waste and pollution.
The Windmill grass does not need me to admire it. It simply releases its seeds.
And I am releasing seeds too.
When I refuse to recognize my ecological sins, perhaps what I scatter is not holiness but self-righteousness.
But the Gospel offers another possibility.
The sinful woman does not remain trapped in the identity of sinful. Recognition becomes repentance; repentance encounters mercy; mercy becomes gratitude; and gratitude blossoms into great love.
Perhaps ecological conversion begins the same way.
I do not need to pretend I have never wasted living water.
I need to recognize it.
Confess it.
Receive mercy.
Change.
And then scatter different seeds.
—
Oratio — My prayer
Lord Jesus Christ,
I find it easier to confess that the world is sinful
than to say that I am sinful.
Give me the humility of the woman who came to You
without excuses and without self-righteousness.
Show me the sins I have made ordinary:
the unnecessary thing purchased,
the plastic casually discarded,
the water allowed to run,
the creature treated merely as useful,
the gifts of creation consumed without gratitude.
Forgive me when I have treated living water
as my possession rather than Your gift.
Let Your mercy fall upon the hard places of my heart
like rain upon the dry ground at The Glenn.
And when You forgive me,
do not allow me merely to feel better.
Let forgiveness change me.
May the seeds I scatter today
be seeds of restraint, gratitude, justice, tenderness and love.
And when the wind carries them beyond places I can see,
may something good grow there.
Amen.
—
Contemplatio — SINFUL
I stand before the Windmill grass and watch a sermon being preached without words.
Seeds travel farther than their source.
The same is true of technology.
Magnifica humanitas forces me to look beyond the glowing screen in my hand and ask where the seeds of artificial intelligence actually come from. Pope Leo XIV warns that the principles of Catholic Social Doctrine—common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and justice—must shape not merely what technology does after it is created, but the conditions under which it is designed in the first place.
That turns the word sinful in an unexpected direction.
It is tempting to imagine that sin resides somewhere else: in the corporation, the algorithm, the billionaire, the government, the developer, the data center.
But an algorithm can magnify seeds that human beings have already planted.
Bias.
Greed.
Exploitation.
Concentration of power.
Indifference toward invisible workers.
The assumption that because something can be done, it therefore should be done.
AI does not absolve me of moral responsibility any more than the wind absolves the grass of producing the seed it carries.
And perhaps the same discernment applies at The Glenn.
The water flowing from my well, the electricity powering my devices, the plastic arriving with the things I purchase, and the digital systems answering my questions can all become invisible precisely because they are convenient.
The danger is that convenience becomes a kind of innocence:
I didn’t mean any harm.
But the sinful woman in today’s Gospel teaches me something more demanding and more beautiful.
I do not become free by proving my innocence.
I become free by receiving mercy.
So I need not fear the word sinful.
The word does not have to be the end of my story.
It can be the beginning of conversion.
And perhaps this is where living water finally meets Windmill grass.
The water of grace reaches the sinful soil of my life. Christ does not merely wash away what has been; he makes possible what might yet grow.
The question is therefore not simply:
Am I sinful?
I already know the answer.
The better question is:
Now that I have been forgiven, what seeds will I scatter?
And perhaps, carried by the Spirit like seed upon the Panhandle wind, repentance itself can become something fertile.
**Forgiven much.
Loving much.
Consuming less.
Wasting less.
Sharing more.
And letting the Living Water flow toward life.**
Day 17 of the Season of Creation
