Secateurs or rough tooth saw blade?
Signpost for Sunday 28 April 2024: Acts 8:26-40; Ps 22:25-31; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8.
Last time I wrote about the ‘true vine’ verses in 2021 I mentioned the wisteria that I used to prune in our old house. This week I came across something I wrote over twenty years ago. I went on a one day retreat and the passage that we all had to think about happened to be the same verses from this week’s gospel reading.
It’s a bit of a (long) meditation on the imagery used in the passage. I thought you might be interested to read it:
Pruning
…my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit… John 15:1
I have always been afraid that I would be cut off because I bear no fruit or inadequate fruit. It always seems like a threat – bear fruit or burn (John 15:7).
Today while those same feeling arose again, I felt a different interpretation was possible, for my life at least.
If I am a branch, pruning does not always mean chopping off the whole branch. It more often means cutting back to a shoot, a tiny vulnerable red or green bud.
When I pruned the wisteria last year, I thought it was dead. Yet I knew I had left those vulnerable buds in a few places. But I thought I hadn’t left enough of them. The body of the plant itself looked old and spent. Would it have the strength to rejuvenate through those few buds? Were they the right buds? What shape would the plant grow back in? What had been destroyed?
It came back as full as before, but quite different. It no longer clung to the balcony outside our bedroom. Bravely it reached out along the wire that led to the pergola where, in an ideal world, it would day create a beautiful shady place. The wire that it travelled along almost snapped with the weight of new growth. It swung precariously above our heads as we lay in the summer sun on the terrace. And I thought I should climb up and nail it into place. Add strength. But I never did because I thought I was too busy, and I know I was too lazy. Maybe it was even a subconscious thing; I wanted to see if the plant would make it on its own, if the old trunk and the new shoots together could travel that vital two metres and establish a hold on the first crossbeam of the pergola.
The wisteria made it without my help, and when it tentatively thrust out shoots that reached groping into the air, my heart softened. I stood on a chair and gently wrapped the green shoot round the brown beam.
This year I am waiting for the leaves to fall again and make their small piles which swirl into such perfect spirals in the breeze that people think I have deliberately swept them there, but I haven’t. Then it will be time to prune again. And this time I’ve already decided I won’t need to cut as much. That I will nail up that wire because the wisteria made its own way anyway and now pruning feels more like cultivation than harsh maintenance.
Last year I slashed at branches. I wanted to clear the growth around the windows so we could see out again. I wanted to stamp on the fingers that clutched at the balcony, dragging the weight of the plant up behind it, ugly against the wall. Now I feel content with the way the plant is – it and I have a kind of understanding.
And then there’s that other pruning. It came to me that the pruning I had dreaded wasn’t going to happen, wasn’t going to leave me as the dead growth watching through the haze of smoke as I died while the rest of the vine went on growing.
I thought back to all the meanings around pruning; and its real meaning is growth. I felt God saying (not in an echoey voice, but that way that is thought, a realisation) that I wasn’t the dead wood. I was the bud left behind. That not all of the branch was chopped off, only chopped back.
Re-birth is not the only image that helps – maybe this pruning is more pertinent to my kind of slow, twisted way of growing towards God.
I felt that the vine is there, that my branch is still there too, that I am still who I was and that I don’t have to feel guilty about that. Some bad things have been pruned. There is more pruning to come. I may even pray for pruning now.
Get rid of the dead wood of my selfishness. Hack off the dead wood of my habitual problems. Cut out the dead wood of my stunted emotions.
And yet, that is not quite right either. I get the impression God prunes me with secateurs not a rough tooth saw. Cutting bits off at a time; almost as if to say, “OK you think you only need to lose a little there? Well, try and see if that’s enough.” It’s a bit like a haircut – we can always take more off.
Back to the vine, the thick tangle of much of what went with the first fifteen or so years of my working life has been cut off. But the buds left behind were the good parts of that. Some things have blossomed that I always knew were there. A few things have grown, are trying to grow. There’s even new dead wood. The really good news is that God is a much better gardener than me.
(Written 17th May 2003)
Paul
Signposts 