Friends,
When I was a child (on the outside and not just the inside), I wanted to be a botanist. I loved plants, especially flowers and the butterflies they attracted, and I reveled in the stories and illustrations of books like The Carrot Seed, The Gardener, and The Plant Sitter. What I should have realized was that I liked the books and looking at the flowers way more than working hard to weed, water, and tend plants so that they flourished. Really, 6-year-old me was woefully unwise.
While I’m grateful for the path I chose, one filled with books (many of them arranged in what I consider an artistic row of stacks against a wall of my apartment), I have come to see the need to get my hands dirty in whichever field I choose to cultivate my life. Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light, but they still are a yoke and a burden alongside gifts beyond estimation. They weigh on me the most when they confront me with my mortality and fragility: I will die; I have hurt and will hurt people through intentional and unintentional actions; and I cannot live happily on my own. For all the trust I profess and have in the resurrection, God’s forgiveness, and our God-given fulfillment in relationship, I struggle to follow Jesus’ maxim in yesterday’s Gospel: “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (John 12:24).
Artificial plants remain perennially verdant and require at most a light dusting and rearranging. However, they lack the beauty of living plants that change each day, grow and shed leaves and flowers, and eventually die (sometimes alarmingly quickly at my hands). Inherent to living a real life is drinking the cup of suffering, even if that is only the suffering of losing people and parts of yourself to age and physical limits. We do not need to glorify death or suffering – far from it – but we do need to acknowledge them as Jesus did. What’s more, we need to rejoice in and embrace the irreplaceable newness of each moment that is the result of our mortality. God did this to the point of being human in Jesus. That seed buried in our soil took root and rose to new life, bearing fruit for all of us and becoming a salvific vine on which we can graft ourselves. How much we graft ourselves corresponds to how much we can accept the reality of death, of getting our hands dirty in the mess both beautiful and frightening that is this world, and of the law of love for God eternal and neighbor mortal written on our hearts.
The process of grafting requires us to shed some, maybe even most, of our leaves, to let elements of our lives die that keep us back from the life Jesus constantly offers to us in the Spirit. Lent is a special time for us to discern what these death-dealing elements are and to let them themselves die so that we may more fully live into the Resurrection we celebrate on Easter.
What in your life must die, friends? Where is Jesus calling us to new life? How can you plant seeds of goodness in the neighborhood, state, country, world, and/or church that bear fruit, even if not in your lifetime?
Whatever happens today, remember this: you are loved, worthy of love, and called to love today, during this Lenten season, and throughout your life. Thanks for joining me for this fourth of at least seven weekly reminders, friends! I pray that you encounter God in yourself, in others, and in creation this week.
The Catholic Errant 