The tag team blooming festival of spring is in full swing all over in the South!  Strolling through the front yard in the mornings provides an environment of centering, stillness and beauty as the day opens up!  It’s amazing to me how just a few moments in the yard, enjoying both the sights and fragrances of newness can not only grant the energy to go forward into the day, but also provides a grand stage that can come along with me and frame all that may happen in the hours of the day with a tone that will keep me breathing in a Space of connectedness to a much wider arena than just the often small and seemingly constricting areas that I may find myself in as the day passes.  I can try to breathe and pause in each moment!

The early church experienced the struggles of staying connected as it rapidly grew from the original confines of only those of Jewish descent becoming baptized into the new way to the fuller inclusiveness of the Gentiles, i.e., all others being attracted to and following this new Way of living and loving.  And so, in today’s first reading we hear the struggles surrounding how traditional practices can both identify but also segregate and separate a new community of disciples.

“The Apostles and the presbyters met together to see about this matter.”  (ACTS 15: 1-6)

As we hear how the first Council (Jerusalem) came about, it’s the issue of whether or not the Gentiles must be circumcised in order to be considered saved.  Wow!  How amazing that we are still dealing with the same type of issues today as we struggle as a world community to live authentic lives in Christianity, and really, all religions and all cultures!  Who’s in and who’s out?  How we identify ourselves in our religious, social, national, and all other types of culture, can be such a beautiful and life-giving expression in the world.  But we have all seen and perhaps participated in how this can seemingly just as easily be used for cultural self-aggrandizement and the resulting exclusivity and violent marginalization of those who don’t fit in.

If I walk around the front yard, and the side of the house, open a gate into the back yard, I see how the back yard has been transformed.  After a couple of years of neglect, thanks to a household retiree and the stay-at-home imposition by COVID19, the pruning, weeding and cultivation has been done and now it has been transformed from an overgrown environment into a most welcoming space of beauty and fragrance.

And then we have John’s Gospel describing the almost sublime image of the Vine and the Branches, (JN 15: 1-8).

“Jesus said to his disciples: ‘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 everyone that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit. You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you.’ “

Here we hear how pruning is a good and necessary thing.  In fact, pruning allows the possibility for more fruit.  But pruning is not about cutting things off as much as it is about granting a suppleness or unfettered flexibility that must exist in order for something new and nourishing, like fruit, to be born.  Yes, we may have to get rid of or let go of certain things, like mindsets of superiority and compulsive self-centeredness that perpetuate ignorance and indifference, resulting in pushing people away from each other, in an attempt to “cut them off.”  But pruning is not about severing life, but about sustaining the life of the whole plant, or as Jesus says, remaining on the vine.

“Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”

If we are all the branches, the task is to prune ourselves and each other, by not cutting off each other like branches but just trimming them up a bit.  This is compassionate accountability that transforms us into fruit, or indeed gifts to one another.  And I think it can happen at every level.  It can appear in a one-on-one interchange with someone with whom you disagree.  If we listen, I mean really listen, to a situation, to another person, what we will hear has the capacity to both grant us a better understanding of ourselves and the situation and/or other person.  It is an opening up that can remain within us.  This is a way of remaining on the Vine.  Staying with something difficult and even painful long enough – whether it be an argument with someone who seems to have a completely different view from you on a certain issue, or an inevitable and uncontrollable life circumstance that seems to be rendering you powerless.

The fruit of relationship in community can only happen when we remain with each other and compassionately hold each other accountable – not by cutting each other off, but by patiently pruning each other.  And something new will always come about as a result of this, even though it may take some time for everyone to see it.

Instead of exclusion that could be symbolized by the issue of circumcision in the Acts of the Apostles, we have the opportunity for a pruning connectedness – a clearing away of that which is not necessary and in fact can be detrimental to the vine.  Instead of running away, we become a – way for each other to live and love and bear much fruit together.  We remain with each other on the vine.  This is a space of transformative beauty that we can breathe in at any time in any situation together- the branches connected to the Vine of Mercy that can bear the true fruit of the vine, i.e., a very fine wine.

Peace

Thomas

(Originally published April 27, 2016)