Spiritual Gardening

Prayer for the Day

“Jesus, I am so grateful for your love and mercy. Help me to remain in you, Lord, so that I can become more and more pure and fruitful!”  Amen.

Reflection

In the days after Easter we have been hearing about the early Church.

Little by little, the apostles and disciples branched out and spread the faith throughout the known world. During His earthly life, Christ had prepared His followers to do so, even telling them what they should wear.

 In John 15:5 we hear Christ telling His followers that "He is the vine, and they are the branches."  One thing we know about vines and branches is their dependence on one another. Without the vine, the branch will die, and yet without the branch the vine will not grow.

Christ lives forever, but without the mission work of those who came before us, we would not have our faith today.  It is up to us to continue passing on the Good News, beginning with good Christian example in all that we do.  If we can achieve that, questions about the faith will follow.

“He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit.” (John 15:2) 

On Saturday (it may have been Sunday—all of last week is a blur to me now), Marilyn decided that it was time we pruned the bushes in our front yard that separate our yard from the neighbor’s driveway (and boat).  We have been debating the issue on and off for quite some time now, because a lot of the shrub was dead, but the healthy parts were really healthy but out of control.  I wanted to get rid of them altogether, and plant something more pleasant, less itchy and easier to maintain.  Marilyn is still thinking about this solution but in the meantime we decided some major pruning was in order.  After we got rid of the dead growth, the plant actually looked like it was thriving. 

Always on the lookout for ideas for my daily blog, I couldn’t help but equate the dead branches with sin and how they had been holding back the true beauty of the shrub.  It’s still itchy and irritable and a little out of control, but with a little more pruning and cultivation I think we can probably save the shrub and even enhance it with other features planted or placed around it.  All it took was getting rid of the ‘sin’ and allowing the plant room to grow properly in the way we intended in the first place.

In the same way, clearing away the sin from our souls by a good confession and penance allows us to grow closer to God.  While we too may remain a little ‘itchy and irritable’ and ‘out of control,’  a soul that is less cluttered with dead growth enables the Holy Spirit to take over and ‘enhance’ us with graces that will make us more fruitful in our devotion to Christ.  And of course a little ‘watering’ by Our Blessed Mother through the daily recitation of her Rosary doesn’t hurt, either. With this TLC, we should be able to once again bear good fruit through our witness to others and be found a little more worthy of the salvation gained for us by Jesus on His Cross.