This fall, our Bishop, Craig Loya, has been asking the whole diocese to engage in Gospel-Based discipleship around one text–Jesus’s metaphor of the vine and branches in the Gospel of John. This time of Scripture study is always followed by a brief prayer practice, usually involving some kind of centering prayer.
I’m grateful to have a Bishop who practices what he preaches and makes sure our gatherings always begin with Scripture and prayer. But, gotta be honest, repetition has never been my favorite, and lately, I’ve been feeling like I’ve had enough of branches thrown into the fire and all that relentless abiding. And (full disclosure) when the prayer practice leader on Zoom tells me, again, to close my eyes and ground my feet on the floor, more often than not I turn off my video and refill my coffee cup (walking meditation’s good, right?)
Yesterday, though, the prayer leader in our morning meeting invited us to do something different. “Put the word abide on a piece of paper,” she said, “and write a poem. Whatever comes to you.” The Zoom screen lit up with people scribbling. And as tired as I was of Jesus and his vines, all those weeks of abiding in Jesus’s love clicked for me as well.
Except it was not the grapevine but our front yard apple tree, the one that gifted us this fall with bushels of sweet, juicy apples that came to mind, all mixed up with so many relationships: the vine and the branches, mother and child, God’s many rooms and my home, the pandemic and its end, Mother Earth and Mother God, the Spirit and us.
Prayer and God’s Word, tedium and time, and the Spirit’s slow and invisible tending to the soul, bearing its fruit.
Sunday Morning Words 