GRAFTED

For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please… Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarned you that those who practice such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. ~ Galatians 5:17-23

I am developing a tree obsession – a deep study of the beauty, the intricacies and the out workings of any one single tree could easily inspire a year’s worth of blog posts. I have two plum trees growing in my back yard that wrap around each other like lovers, side by side as though one tree. They were planted that way, for fruit bearing purposes – only when they are bare can you tell them apart.

 

I believe that everything God creates speaks something to us about the Ineffable – mysterious, unknowable, unspeakable things that are within the Divine heart. There are things that are too Spiritual to elevate us while harnessed by words.

Trees have sacred carved all over them – devoted to God for Divine purpose. Not carved totems of Theology, but living witnesses to the workings of the mysterious, unknowable Knower. Trees are preachers of Truth that is at once both wild and ordained – they make entry into our most pivotal stories, from the Garden of Eden to the crucifixion to the New Jerusalem.

Standing in a forest, we feel the importance of the created thing – our hearts instinctively grow quiet, swelling up with poems and songs and meditations that are all completely inadequate to express what is inside us. We want to breathe deeply, we feel pressed with the need for silence. The hush is a reaching out, a soul response to the Good News we hear preached to us, each in our own language – a response to their heavenly glossolalia, like the tongues of angels – words we hear and understand, but that we cannot repeat back.  

Sacred can’t be uttered – the best of words can diminish it making it appear trivial, exaggerated and ornamental. You have to climb a tree. You have to sit in its branches, wrap your arms around it, feel its strength and its bending, its roots and its reaching, and be one of the living things that nests in it. You have to smell its blossoms, get scraped by it, sit under it, pick its fruit, rake its dead leaves, be still and contemplate.

In contemplating the metaphor of the fruit bearing tree, and exploring whether or not a person might realistically be able to grow an apple tree from seed, I discovered something completely fascinating about the nature of apple trees. You can grow an apple tree from seed – but the fact is that if you want to grow a particular kind of apple, this is not how the tree is reproduced. You cannot plant the seeds from the fruit in your lunch, and expect to grow a tree bearing Golden Delicious apples.  

It has everything to do with the birds and the bees – Spring air, blossoms and pollination. The seeds an apple carries are not clones of it, but are rather a combined genetic coding of two separate trees – the parent tree that it grew on, and the random tree with no name that fertilized it. If you grew an apple tree from seed, it could take ten years of watering, pruning, fertilizing, de-bugging, watching the weather, before you had any idea what kind of apple you were even growing. Chances are good that it wouldn’t be tasty, and you’d love it for its profusion of blossoms. Chances are good that the baby daddy would be a crab apple.

A tree will always produce the same kind of apples, but the seeds its apples carry may be different with every harvest. If you want to grow a tree that will produce the same kind of apple as the one you hold in your hand, you can’t do it from seed – a chosen rootstalk must be grafted with a branch from a tree that bears the desired fruit.

Grafting is a simple process of making a split into the branch of a tree or into a rootstalk, into which a branch from another tree is inserted. The grafted branch is bound tightly and eventually fuses together with the rootstalk, becoming part of the tree as it grows. Amazingly, through grafting you can actually grow peaches, apricots, cherries and plums, or grow several different varieties of apples, all together on one single tree at the same time.

This, of course, makes me think about Romans 11, where Paul refers to the church in Rome as a grafted in branch – a wild olive branch grafted in to a cultivated tree. Apparently, like virtually all fruit trees, olive trees that have been grown directly from seed do not generally make for tasty fruit. Olive trees grown from the seed of cultivated trees backslide into wild olive trees – the fruit they produce is almost certain to be bitter and tiny, inedible though pretty to look at.

I am pondering the metaphor – wondering what exactly God desires me to see. I am wondering which I am – the seeded tree, or the grafted branch – or if I am somehow both.

I see how I am part of the great, blended family of undefined parent origins – one part of the Tree, one part of the world – Divine nurture and sin nature wrapped in rings through my growing. I bear fruit of peace filled with wild seeds, reproducing in my own sullied image, involuntarily spreading, prolific without intention – sometimes tasty, sometimes tart. I am part of an ever enlarging kingdom of trees growing Spirit fruit – created to sow seed, to expand, to branch off, to spread wastefully without trying, seeding new and differing apple trees with every season.

Some of what comes out of me is fit for human consumption, some feeds the birds, some feeds the earth – but the Spirit of God is somehow at work in it all. God alone is able to distinguish the good from the bad, the ornamental from the necessary, letting it all grow together, fully able to work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called to His purposes.

This truly is how we grow. We are each unique – whatever our doctrine, its outworking in our lives never looks the same. We don’t bear fruit or reproduce trees that bear fruit with the exact quality and flavour as any other of our type. We don’t bear fruit in every season. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – these can seem somewhat subjective. One person’s love is another person’s hate. One person’s faithfulness tastes sweet while another’s is bitter and sours the stomach.

We are all intentioned to make an offering of the small, simple, honest thing that is in us, though it varies greatly in taste and appearance – to let joy ripen and drop freely from our branches, and to not concern ourselves with what lies dormant inside it, or with where and what it will grow. To explode wastefully, bountifully, lavishly, like God does, without thought for self-preservation or worry – to exponentially multiply the fruit of His Spirit within us for the nourishment of the world. We do not bring life to the dead seed, we do not cause the fruit to grow, and we do not control what influences its nature. We are not the Life, we are not the Arborist, we are not the Wind.

Still, I know that there is wildness in my flesh. Unless I am somehow saved from this inherent pomme sauvage savagery, there is a latent tendency both in my seed and in my very nature towards growing and exponentially reproducing fruit that is bitter, small and just for show. My goodness is so hard, so meager, it wouldn’t satisfy anybody. It is no kind of food source. Only God is good.

I am one who has been purposed by the Wise Arborist, a twig plucked out of the natural, the uncultivated, the neglected, and grafted in to the One Good Root Stalk. I have been tightly bound to the One Tree in order to be part of It, to have a share in It, to be sustained by It, nourished by It, sanctified by It – to be transformed to Its nature, in order to produce good fruit that is pleasing, satisfying, and nourishing to the world God loves. God intentioned us to carry the select fruit that His Spirit bears, choosing to supernaturally bypass the erratic, unruly nature of our seeds, going so far as to make them irrelevant. If I don’t bear good fruit, then for the health of the Tree, for the purposes of the Tree, I can be cut off to make room for a twig that will.

It is a big, beautiful metaphor – it’s bigger than me, branching off into a thousand directions. I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I feel it diminished with every word. It makes me wish for all the world for Spring leaves to blanket the bare branches of the trees – that those two growing stark as lovers in my back yard would cover themselves and appear to me as one. I want to climb up into my best climbing tree and just sit there. I want to watch the wind moving through the green, listen to the birds, and study the bugs. I want to close my eyes and breathe deeply of God in all His mysterious splendour – feel in every cell of my body the silencing beauty of wildness. I want to be still and know that He is God.

I want to know everything within me humming in harmony to the melody of tree – Who is like Thee among the gods, O Lord? Who is like Thee, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders? ~ Exodus 15:11

By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. ~ Jesus