Not long ago a student of mine wrote a descriptive essay on the Church. It was one of the most celebrative and exuberant pieces that I had read in quite a while. He used the body imagery of St. Paul to draw his picture of the Church, but he could just as easily have used the positive agricultural figures of today's parable. It would be true to the spirit of his paper to call the Church a weedless and ripening field. Into rich soil good seeds have been planted and now as far as the eye can see there is wheat and barley growing in one great unbroken mass. The field is so well tended that it contains no useless or injurious plants. It is a clear version of the garden of Eden, the place where everything is "pleasant to the sight and good for food." It is a place of unadulterated growth, of bea…