Popcorn and the spiritual path

I have the great fortune to spend time at our monastery in Tucson, AZ every February because we usually host a discernment weekend at that time.  I always make sure I come after the oranges have been picked and the juice has been squeezed.  If you have ever tasted homegrown and squeezed orange juice, you know it's nectar of the gods!  Praise be to our God for creating such a wonderful drink!

In one of the talks I gave this past weekend I shared about popcorn and the spiritual path.  The reading from the prophet Joel that we heard on Ash Wednesday has a wonderful line in it - 'rend your hearts and not your garments.'    People seem to be rending their garments quite often in the Hebrew Scriptures. It was a sign of grief, anger or despair.  So, Joel is telling us to rend our hearts - in other words, crack open the hard shell we've built around it so as to let God in.

I happened upon an article in our magazine Spirit&Life by our Sr. Dawn Annette while preparing for the discernment weekend that I thought was a good image of letting ourselves get cracked open.  We started a business 1 1/2 years ago called Prayerfully Popped so Sr. Dawn 
wrote about popcorn in a spiritual light.   In it she describes how popcorn becomes popcorn.  

The shell of the kernel is very hard, you can't eat it raw, at least those of us who respect our teeth try not to!  But, there is a drop of water inside that kernel that when heated up, turns into steam and explodes outward changing the glop of starch in the kernel to the fluffy white thing we know as popcorn.  So basically, it turns itself inside out.

On the spiritual path we can either be a kernel that doesn't do anything, or we can let ourselves be transformed.  The heat that gets applied to us are those impulses of grace from God that might be urging us to do something different with our lives such as considering a religious vocation.  If we are resistant, we stay just a hard kernel that doesn't do anything.  But if we are open, (let's face it - exploding outward will not be a walk in the park), God can transform us into something unexpected.

The transformation takes place in our deepest center.  And that little drop of water inside the kernel symbolizes that our heart needs to be moist.  It can't be dry and barren.  A moist heart can soak up the word of God in whatever form it takes whereas hard and dry soil just causes the water to run off.

We have to let go of what we thought we were, the kernel of ourselves, and let God transform us into what we are meant to be.  A scary proposition! 

So, the next time you are eating a bag of popcorn, think about whether you are ready to let God turn you inside out!

 The entire article can be found here:
http://benedictinesisters.org/images/spiritandlife/SLNovDec11.pdf#page=9