Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Pruned into the shape of Christ




For fifteen years before I became a priest I was a farmer and a gardener.  I worked on a 15-acre organic produce farm near the coast in West Marin, and a two-acre vacant lot next to a public housing project by the freeway in San Francisco.  I eventually started my own organic gardening business serving residential customers.  Doing business as Green Man Gardening I did a little bit of everything from weeding and raking leaves to designing and installing landscapes, stonework, and irrigation systems.  But the thing I found that I loved the most to do was pruning trees—fruit trees, in particular. 
The thing about pruning trees is that it is a conversation.  You prune the tree in winter and then you step back and you wait to see how it responds.  Over time the conversation deepens.  You get to where you make a cut thinking about what the tree is going to do, not the next year, but the year after that, or the year after that.  There were trees in yards in San Francisco that I pruned for almost ten years, and as time went on, and my understanding of those trees grew, they assumed something closer and closer to what you might call the “right” form.  It was a shape that emerged not out of an idea in my mind, and not out of the spontaneous pattern of the tree’s growth, but out of a dialogue between the two.
And the more that happens the less pruning that’s required.  It got to be so that I could do the winter pruning on some of those trees in less than an hour, where at first it might have taken half a day.  The dead wood and crossing branches and sucker limbs that I found when I first started caring for them were long gone, and they had an open, many-tiered structure.  This allowed for good air circulation and let sunlight fall on the lower limbs as well as the ones at the top.  I thought those trees were beautiful, and I was as proud of them as if they were works of art that I had made.  They also happened to yield large crops of good-sized, disease-free fruit.
The Gospel of John imagines that this is how God interacts with us.  God is a vinegrower, as translated in our version, although the Greek original says “farmer.”  The actual word is “Georgos,” which is where the name “George” comes from, and literally it means “one who works the earth.”  I point this out because I like the connotations of that word.  John’s vision of God is of one who works the earth, a God who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty, who is involved down here on earth with us.  God works with us the way a farmer works with the vines in her vineyard, the same way that I used to work with those trees.  She makes her cuts, shortening a branch here, removing a branch there, and then waits for us to grow in response.

Not that we particularly like being pruned.  I think I was about twelve or thirteen when I became aware of a growing sense of restlessness, impatience and frustration.  It wasn’t about what was happening in my life, as much as it was about what wasn’t happening.  As adolescents we start to feel the full scope of our potential.  We desire to grow, to expand, to learn, and to make our mark on the world; and that makes us that much more dissatisfied with the limitations of life as it is, with being an ordinary thirteen year-old kid living with his parents and his brothers, going to school, with chores to do, and homework, and a long way to go to be a man.  That struggle between yearning for growth and acceptance of limits, is, I suppose, the great theme of the never-ending process we call “growing up.”
But it feels very different now from how it did when I was thirteen.  I’ve gotten sick, like I am today, and been injured, and had my heart broken.  I’ve done a hundred stupid things that I’m lucky didn’t get me killed.  I’ve taken wrong turns, and I’ve failed.  I’ve sinned and hurt people and had to ask for their forgiveness.  I’ve struggled to forgive those who’ve sinned against me.  I’ve had to work for a living—for almost twenty years it was at hard physical labor.  So you could say I’ve been chastened.  You could say the hard knocks of life have taught me to lower my expectations, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong.
But that’s not the whole story, because along the way I’ve learned lessons that are not just about swallowing disappointment or giving up on the dreams of youth.  They are lessons about how much you can learn when you devote yourself to something in a sustained and disciplined way for a long time, whether it’s an art, or a profession, or a relationship.  They are lessons about how you can grow when you make the decision that where you are right now, and what you are doing, and who you are with, has everything to give you—if not everything you want, then everything you really need.  The lessons that actually change us for the better and make us more mature are not only about what is realistic, but also about what is possible when you are willing to make the effort, and take the risk, to love.     
The gospel talks about the branches that do not abide in Christ, how they are cut and thrown away, how they wither, and are gathered up and burned.  We hear these words and they make us afraid, because they sound to us like punishment.  And that is, in fact, how we often interpret the things that happen in our lives that cut us back, the defeats and injuries and losses that cause us to suffer, and that we struggle to accept.  But we read in the 1st Letter of John that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveals that God is not a punishing Father who ought to be feared.  The Father of Jesus Christ is a God who works the earth, a God who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.  This is a God of love, love that casts out the fear of punishment.  

Jesus promises, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you,” but when he says this he’s not talking about the kind of wishes I had when I was thirteen.  He is not talking about our wish to be exempted from the trials and difficulties that going along with life here in this world.  He is not talking about desire for superiority and the admiration of others.  This is not some kind of magic spell for turning straw into gold, or frogs into princes.
He is talking about growing up into Christ, the growth that begins at baptism.  Today we mark the beginning of that growth for Abigail Josephine Johnson.   It would be nice to be able to say to Abbie, and to her parents and godparents, that now her troubles are over, but that is not what baptism means—not exactly.   What it does mean is that, for Abbie, as for all of us, those troubles don’t have to be meaningless.  Because God is working on us, is working in us, and with us.  And because God is love, and in love he sent his Son to suffer with us, even our worst traumas and failures don’t have to mean that we are punished.  They don’t have to be the final judgment on our lives.  In a manner we can’t exactly explain, we can make peace with our sufferings, as what prune us into the shape of Christ.  They are how our own free will and spontaneous growth become infused with his mission, how we take on his commitment to being rooted in the earth and to lovingly, patiently bear fruit for the Kingdom of God. 

And if we stay with this journey, what we wish for changes.  Instead of desiring to have things for ourselves, we wish for what we can become for others.  We still yearn for what popular psychology calls “personal growth” but we understand that the growth that will make us truly happy and free, really full of life, is growth in connection.  Our longing is to have love and understanding, compassion for and insight into the needs of others, and skill and wisdom to truly help them.  The desire we learn from Jesus is to be a person through whom other people let go of fear, and receive God’s love and forgiveness.  And when that is what we truly wish for, the promise says, our lives bear fruit—fruit that will last.

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.