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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