Will You Burn and Bear Fruit?

The third Sunday of Lent finds us at another waystation on the pilgrim road to Easter, where St Benedict urges us to travel in the joy of the Holy Spirt and with great longing.  Our theme of memory continues to serve us as a kind of map.  The memory of the Church, the people of God, reaches further back than we alone can fathom, showing us in symbolic images who we are and where we are going.  We are invited to enter into these images in an embodied way, through our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.  It is Divine memory that invites us in, to participate in the memory of the One for whom all are alive, under whose gaze we discover ourselves.

Where am I?  A shepherd stands before a bush in the wasteland; a gardener stands before a fig tree in an orchard.  The richness of memory reveals trees and plants as symbols of God’s care for his people.  The trees in the garden provide food at every season to nourish man’s body and delight his heart.  And part of God’s providential plan involves the work of tending the garden, pruning the vine, fertilizing the ground so that there can be a time for harvesting the fruit which sustains life.

What am I looking for?  Or, who is looking for me?  Moses is tending his flock.  He is just doing the work that has been given him.  He happens to have crossed the desert and reached the mountain of God, but this was not by any plan or intention of his.  He did not go in search of God, but God found him.  God surprised him such that he turned from this daily activity in wonder.  A bush that was burning and yet was not consumed.  Suddenly, what is ordinary reveals itself as extraordinary, provoking questions in Moses’ heart: Why is this?  What does it mean?  Who is it who addresses me?  The words that he hears cause him to remove his shoes, to cover his face, and to resist with all that is in him.

Can I do this?  Do I have what it takes?  What am I afraid of?  Mother Agnes, in her meditations on the life of a monastery cobbler, describes how she needed to light the stove in her cobbler shop every day.  This was something that had to be accomplished on hands and knees, with head bent to peer into the darkness, fingers fumbling for the pilot.  Sometimes it would take many tries.   She compares this to the effort and perseverance needed for God to set her alight, to get her attention and full engagement.  The burning bush calls us to burn likewise.  Like Moses, we are called beyond our comfort zone, beyond our place of quotidian safety and satisfaction.  We learn that the work God has in mind for us is more than we thought, more than just making ends meet.  It sets us afire, like that dry bush, enlivened, but not consumed with the flame of spiritual desire.  We burn with dissatisfaction, with the refusal simply to roll over and accept the evils of the present, the sufferings of a people in captivity, and of our own captivity in fear.

Do I entrust myself to the One who calls me out of the bush?  Will I let the gardener do his work on me?  As he approaches his passion, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, expressing the deepest sorrow that it has remained an unfruitful tree.  His final act of persuasion will be himself to hang as the fruit of a tree.  The dry branch is separated from the lifegiving vine.  It is dead and ready to be discarded, not as punishment but as a free choice not to remain in him.  Will we choose to live or die, to receive the lifegiving sap, or to refuse it, block it, and wither away, all because we were afraid?  This is the question we are faced with today.  Are you willing to burn with the fire of spiritual desire?  Are you open to bearing fruit for the kingdom?


Image: My Burning Bush, by Ain Vares