Our gospel reading today continues our discussion on the “Sower.” We have previously noted that God’s generosity is beyond our human understanding as He sows seed everywhere. Fr. Ron Rolheiser looks at God’s abundance from a perspective of how we embrace God’s generosity in a world becoming increasingly divided and separated. He asks us, “What does it mean to be inclusive?” He writes that it begins with the word “Catholic.” The opposite of being “Catholic” is not being “Protestant”. The opposite of “Catholic” is being narrow, exclusive, and overly selective in our embrace. The opposite of being “Catholic” is to define our faith-family too narrowly. “Catholic” means to be wide and universal. It means incarnating the embrace of an abundant and prodigal God whose sun shines on all indiscriminately, the bad and the good. Jesus once defined this by saying, “In my father’s house, there are many rooms.” God’s heart is wide, abundant, prodigal, and universally embracing. His heart takes care to pray for those “other sheep who are not of this fold.” To be “Catholic” is to imitate that. The God that Jesus reveals to us is a God of infinite abundance. Inside God, there is no scarcity, no stinginess, no sparing of mercy. As the parable of the Sower makes clear, this God scatters his seed indiscriminately on every kind of soil – bad soil, mediocre soil, good soil, excellent soil. God can do this because God’s love and mercy are limitless. It seems God never worries about someone receiving cheap, undeserved grace. Jesus also assures us that God is prodigal, like the father of the prodigal son and his older brother. God embraces both the missteps of our immaturity and the bitterness and resentment within our maturity. Good religion needs to honor that. Today, on both sides of the ideological divide, conservative or liberal alike, we must remind ourselves what living under an abundant, prodigal, universally embracing, and “Catholic” God means. What it means, among other things, is a constant stretching of the heart to an ever-wider inclusivity. How wide are our hearts? Exclusivity can mask itself as depth and passion for truth. Still, it invariably reveals itself in its inability to handle ambiguity and otherness, as rigidity and fear, as if God and Jesus needed our protection. More importantly, it often, too, reveals itself as lacking genuine empathy for those outside its own circle, and in that, it fails to honor its own abundant and prodigal God.