After the last two days in June and the Feast of the Early Martyrs, we pass into July. The cover for this month’s issue is Millet’s The Sower. The accompanying essay by the founder of Magnificat, Pierre-Marie Dumont, underlines the appropriate nature of the subject matter.
“Here the peasant sows as Abel the righteous sowed at the dawn of the world, and as Jesus of Nazareth sowed His word when the fullness of time had come. Millet painted what he himself confessed: ‘The peasant at his work is like a priest at his Mass.’ Then everything becomes clear: the step is a procession, the hand is a blessing, the land is an altar. For to sow is to begin to accomplish the mystery wherein the grain, fallen into the earth, dies in order to live, is lost in order to multiply, disappears in order to rise again. Mystery of mysteries where God explains nothing, yet in the end accomplishes everything in us, for us.”
