A couple of friends, separately, asked if I was gonna “blog” this week.
Truth be told, I thought I might take a week off – since I’m just now wrapping up two different “volunteer” commitments that had taken me away from the keyboard for five consecutive days (including my usual “early Sunday morning” blogging timeslot).
And even as I write these words, it occurs to me how stupefyingly boring it is to be droning on about impediments to my blogging routine.
But if perchance you’re still reading, just thought I’d share a couple of spiritual nuggets that bubbled up whilst I was away from my desk.
This “bubbling” shouldn’t come as a surprise, I suppose. It’s a fruit of having been on retreat – serving on an ACTS team. I encountered the first nugget early one morning as I walked the grounds at LaSalle…and came upon a piece of natural sculpture amongst some of the site’s venerable grottoes: a dead branch.
A fallen branch beckons: What dead wood in me needs to go?
Thus prompted, my early morning musings turned soon enough to John 15, in which Jesus offers his memorable teaching about the vine and the branches. It wasn’t the first time I’d reflected on the role of “pruning” in my spiritual life. But I did notice something – as if for the first time – in this familiar scripture passage.
Jesus says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does [bear fruit], he prunes so that it bears more fruit.”
“Wait…what?” I thought. “Can it be that Jesus himself had fruitless branches? That Jesus, in some way, needed pruning…even as I do?”
As I reflected a bit more, this possibility did not seem quite so heretical. We know Jesus to be fully human, after all. And the human condition, at least as I experience it, demands pruning from time to time: Dead wood gets cleared away. (That is, in fact, one of the fruits – the blessings – of going on retreat.)
“So,” I began to wonder, “what might have been some of the ‘fruitless’ branches in Jesus’ life? Where might he have discovered ‘dead wood’ when he went up the mountain to pray?” But soon enough I realized that those particulars don’t really matter – not nearly as much as recognizing that this need for pruning is a universal human condition. It’s necessary, even for one as faultless as the Son of God.
The more I mused, the more I began to appreciate God’s work as a divine Branch Manager. God’s pruning blesses me, just as it blessed Jesus. God’s tender and expert pruning is an act of love – laser-focused on me (and on each of us) in particular. It’s designed to make me – make us – much more fruitful.
It’s a skillful and labor-intensive process, this act of pruning. And it therefore teaches me something surprising about the Holy One, as St. John remarks in the second reading from this past Sunday’s Mass. When God looks to prune, and we return God’s loving gaze, it’s perhaps then that we begin to “see God as God is.”
The Vine yielded…and shielded nothing from the Vinegrower’s expertise. In so doing, Jesus redeemed the world.
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 