One of the most interesting stories about St. Lawrence, and probably my favorite story about any saint is the legend surrounding his martyrdom. Lawrence was kind of a smart aleck. The story goes that, as one of the seven deacons for the Church in Rome, he was responsible for the material goods of the Church as well as the distribution of alms to the poor. At some point, the Roman Emperor, Valerian, heard about the vast riches of the Church – for instance, the chalices used for the celebration of the Mass, candlesticks, etc. – and demanded that those items be handed over to the Roman authorities. Lawrence told the Emperor that the Church was indeed rich and asked him for a couple of days to gather the treasures. After three days he brought the emperor a great number of blind, lame, maimed, leprous, orphaned, and widowed people. When Valerian arrived, Lawrence simply said, “These are the treasure of the Church.”

Valerian was so mad at Lawrence that he ordered the deacon be put to death on the spot…but not in any conventional way. Valerian had a gridiron prepared with coals beneath it and had Lawrence’s body placed on it. After he had suffered the pain for a long time, the legend concludes, he made his last cheerful and smart aleck remark, “I’m well done on this side, you can turn me over.” That’s why whenever Lawrence is depicted in art, he is typically always holding a gridiron and wearing a dalmatic (the vestment worn by deacons at Mass).

While this legend is really the only thing we know about Lawrence, it tells us something important about him: that he was willing to give everything for Jesus Christ. And that’s the message that we are challenged with in today’s Gospel as well. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

Each and every day, the Lord calls us to a kind of death – dying to self, letting go of preconceived notions about who God is, resisting temptations to sin, not holding onto past mistakes, allowing the Lord to transform our brokenness. The Lord wants what is best for us. He doesn’t want us to get weighed down by unnecessary things that prevent us from experiencing a deeper communion him, which is the fruit that is born when we give God more and more of our lives.

The question we should all consider today is: what grains are we holding onto? If we truly want to bear great fruit in the spiritual life and become ever more rooted in a relationship with Jesus, we have to let those grains go, whatever they might be. Because as long as we’re clutching and holding on desperately to things that the Lord wants us to let go of, we’ll never be able to receive from God. Let’s ask the Lord to give us the courage to let go of those things and open our hearts to receive the gift of new grain from Him.  

Painting: The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, Peter Paul Rubens, circa 1613. Munich, Germany. Photo by José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro. Used under license CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons.