Luke 14:21

Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame.

The happy and contented burghers in Luke’s Parable of the Wedding Feast are the exact opposite of the great saint whose feast we celebrate today: St. Gregory the Great.  They excused themselves from the Wedding Feast so they could devote their lives to trivialities and ephemera.  St. Gregory the Great took just the opposite course.  He bailed on a life of yuppie achievement and chose to become a monk, contemplating God and doing his little bit for the Kingdom.  The world thought he was throwing away great potential.  But Gregory knew he was blind and lame.  And God, whose opinion is generally to be valued in such evaluations, went and found Gregory in some out-of-the-way highway or byway, and raised him to the Chair of Peter, just to remind us that parables really do come true.