Sunday Meditation: The True Vine

On the fifth Sunday of Easter in Year B, we get another “I Am” passage from the Gospel of John.  Today we get one of my favorites, the pruning of the grapevine in John’s chapter 15.  This is one of my favorite passages because right around this time of year I am pruning my own grapevine.  As it so happens, I pruned last week, a little late in the season, but it’s tough to find a day.  Every year as I prune I mutter “I am the vine, and you are the branches!”  And just as I snip the dead wood and the long extended vines that will not bear fruit, so Jesus says His Father will prune as well.

 

Jesus said to his disciples:

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.

He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit,

and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit.

You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you.

Remain in me, as I remain in you.

Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own

unless it remains on the vine,

so neither can you unless you remain in me.

I am the vine, you are the branches.

Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit,

because without me you can do nothing.

Anyone who does not remain in me

will be thrown out like a branch and wither;

people will gather them and throw them into a fire

and they will be burned.

If you remain in me and my words remain in you,

ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.

By this is my Father glorified,

that you bear much fruit and become my disciples."

~Jn 15:1-8

Notice, Jesus doesn’t just say “I am the vine,” He says “I am the true vine.”  So let’s unpack the metaphor.  God the father is the gardener who prunes; Jesus is the vine; we who are in Him are the branches; the fruit are the good works we do to glorify the Father.  Here are some visuals from my vine.

The vine is the stem and the main vertical branches.  You can see it growing against my fence.

You can see the branches growing off the vine trained to go up toward my deck.

And here’s a top view where you can see the blossoming leaves. 

The fruit will come later in the summer.  I love gardening, but I think the most difficult of my gardening activities is pruning and maintaining a grapevine. 

Dr. Brant Pitre will explain the theology of this passage.

 

That is a great apologetics comment by Dr. Pitre at the end.  Make sure you listen to the end.  I also like Jeff Cavins more pastoral application of the passage.  It’s short enough to include.

Sunday Meditation: "Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me.”

And another John Michael Talbot song appropriate for the reading.

 

Oh how lovely!

Photo Essay: My Mother’s Garden through 2020

Now that spring is here and many are working on our gardens, I wanted to share the pictures I took of my mother’s garden over the course of last year.  A good garden should try to create interest across the seasons.  As one plant recedes another blooms.  I was reviewing the snaps I took over last year and I took a fair amount of my mother’s garden.  I didn’t capture it all, but I did capture most across three seasons.  I missed winter. 

In the front of the house my mother has a Madonna statue where a number of flowering plants blossom throughout the season.  The most stunning is this Hibiscus planted to the left (in the picture) which blooms for a couple of weeks in May.

But if you step back you will see a gorgeous Lincoln rose growing behind. 

You’ll notice to the right (in the picture) and just behind is a black-eyed Susan and a day lily which have not bloom yet.  Here a close up of the rose.

Let’s move on to the summer time.  Here’s a picture of that same front, now with some zinnias (I think) in front of the Madonna.  You can start seeing the yellow day lilies in the back. 

On the side of the house she has an assortment of lilies.

Here is the entire side. 

Opposite the assorted lilies is a climbing pink rose.  But let me take you closer to the climbing rose.

When that climbing rose bursts out, it’s stunning.  Looking toward the back of the yard, you will see the grape arbor as a canopy.  Here is a picture of the grapes hanging down.

Unfortunately the last few years we’ve got some sort of grape disease that kills over three quarters of the grapes.  They grow beautifully but by August they blacken and shrivel up. 

The backyard opens up after the arbor. 

To the left is a fig tree and the tree toward the back on the right is a dwarf pear tree.  The pear tree is old and has now for a couple of years stopped producing.  You can see the various potted plants my mother still tends.  In her younger years this would be full of vegetables.  There she is.  She’s a lot thinner this year now.  She’s lost, not by choice, a lot of weight this year from last with her gastro problems.  But she’s been out there this spring already.

She had a magnificent potted petunia last year.  Back to the front of the house you can see the black-eyed Susan and day lilies in bloom.

 

Some more interest on the side of the house in the summer with tall flowers, potted plants, and more roses.

 

Let me finally show some fall photos, here from the backyard.  Here you see yellow chrysanthemums in bloom in front of the St. Francis statue.  The tree framing from above is a persimmons tree, with the most delicious persimmons I have ever tasted.  They were just about ready to get picked at the time of this picture.  The persimmons tree is just over from the grape arbor.

 

The weight of the ripened persimmons lowers the branches significantly.  Normally the branches are pointing upward.  Some more pictures from the fall. 

There was more.  I didn’t capture pictures of everything.  I missed the dwarf lilac in bloom, a hydrangea, begonias, and annuals.  I just didn’t take pictures of those last year. But not everything in 2020 was bad!

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 8

This is my eighth post on Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. 

Part1 was on the landscape theme. 

Part 2 a photo essay of the New Mexican landscape.  

Part 3 a photo essay of the actual Cathedral referred to in the novel.  

Part 4 on the civilizing effect of Catholicism.  

Part 5 on the reform of the Church from the old order.  

Part 6 on the relationship with the indigenous people.  

Part 7 on the significance of the Cathedral.

This, my last post on Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop are some odd and ends from the conversation on the novel.

Kerstin says:

Beautiful Manny! You are teaching all of us how to pull together the different components of a novel, their connection, and how they are related to one another on a deeper level.

My Response:

Thank you Kerstin.  Of course a novel has to have those integrated components.  That’s one of the reasons I said Dante’s Divine Comedy is the greatest work of literature, the incredible degree of integration.  I found Death Comes to the Archbishop to be a fine work of art, not just because of the lovely writing but because of this integration.  Is a work of literature that is highly integrated a greater work than one that isn’t?  That’s debatable.  I would say it is, but I can see the argument against it.  For instance, Cather’s My Antonia is also a great work of literature, and I think slightly greater work (if one can create a pecking order among great works) than Death Comes for the Archbishop.  Now to my memory, I don’t think My Antonia is quite as integrated as this novel but yet I hold it higher esteem.  Why is that, I ask myself?

I think it comes down to a few minor deficiencies I’ve been attuned to in Death Comes for the Archbishop.  The one that sticks out at me is the story structure, or in a sense lack thereof.  DCFTA is a picaresque novel, that is, one that goes from episode to episode.  That doesn’t mean picaresque novels can’t be great—Don Quixote is a picaresque novel—but there is something loose about them that strikes a reader as less satisfying if the themes are not transcendent.  DCFTA rises to great themes, but they are mostly themes of a time and place, whereas Don Quixote and Divine Comedy (also picaresque) are able to reach for more universal themes.  My Antonia by the way is superbly structured.  Perhaps I’m being overly critical here of DCFTA but I’m just trying to find a shade of difference between great works.

Another deficiency is that the novel seems inappropriately titled.  Yes, Latour dies, but does death actually come for him other than it being a natural end to his life?  And is death really a theme in the novel that it would warrant being in the title?  It’s not as if death started for Latour in the opening pages and then caught up to him at the end.  There are numerous deaths throughout, but I don’t see any thematic thread that connects them.  Again, this is a minor criticism, or perhaps it’s me not seeing the thread.  It could be there.

The beauty of the DCFTA is that it’s like an impressionist painting.  It spreads out before you with color and geometric links that give you an overarching effect.  I think this is why Cather needed to be so integrated.  The novel is beautiful, and I would rank this in the top American novels of all time.  Willa Cather, in my opinion underrated, has at least two novels in such a ranking.

Kerstin says:

I've been thinking of the function of a garden. In nature, we have the raw beauty of Creation, in a garden, we take some of these components to cultivate and sustain us. It isn't only functional, we also bring the beauty of flowers and plant them in a pleasing way. We create outdoor patios and hang a hammock in a tree. We admire the beauty around us. It is a place not only of cultivation but of leisure, a place to rest and retreat, or enjoy grilling a meal for family and friends. It is a place for both solitude and community. It sustains and renews both our bodies and souls on a deep elemental level, that hint of Eden, that is hard to put into words.

My Response:

Just a thought. To the primitive, there is really only two outdoor alternatives. Either you are in wilderness or you are in a garden. The wilderness is rough, random, savage, dangerous. The garden is orderly, nourishing, both nutritionally and spiritually, peaceful, safe. Christ and St. John the Baptist go into the wilderness to overcome their passions. And Christ comes to the garden to seek solace from His heavenly Father. And so we have Eden, the Garden, as the pre-fall place of dwelling. And once they get expelled they are driven to the wilderness. From there humanity needed to cultivate to survive, to restore the Garden of Eden down to earth. So when Christ proclaims the Kingdom of God on earth, perhaps part of that is the building of a garden.

My Comment:

Here’s another interesting tidbit.  Cather published this novel in 1927.  D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist, lived in New Mexico (around Taos, which is an hour north of Santa Fe) in the first half of the 1920s.  He wrote a novel with the same sort of indigenous people called The Plumed Serpent but he set it in Mexico.  He published his novel in 1926, so the two novels amazingly overlap.  Both novels deal with the local cultures and deal with religion.  However, they are almost diametrically apart.  By this time in his life, Lawrence was a Primitivist, and therefore glorified the primitive cultures.  The dark, demonic of the indigenous cultures win out in his novel, while in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Catholicism is firmly planted.  I don’t recommend Lawrence’s novel.  It’s interesting but one of his poorer ones.  He has better novels.  I did my Master’s thesis on DH Lawrence, so I had to read far more of his work than one would have liked. 

My final review:

This is a wonderful historical novel centered on the first Catholic diocese in New Mexico, set from the middle of the 19th century toward the end of the century with the focal point of its first bishop, Bishop Jean-Marie Latour.  The novel moves in wonderfully delineated vignettes that leaves the reader with a sort of an impressionist type painting, if a novel could be described as a painting.  The themes of New Mexico’s unique landscape and the ordering effect of Catholicism to the wild and remote territories come together for a unique American experience.  We see both Latour’s iron will for order and his compassionate love for people, culminating in the building of the beautiful Sante Fè Cathedral, and ultimately we see his final days of life.  Willa Cather captures the American spirit as well as any American writer and outdoes herself in this novel.  Consider this one of the great American novels. 

Faith Filled Friday: Madonna Garden in Spring Bloom

My mother has a Madonna statue in her front garden, which she honors our Blessed Mother with flowers.  The spring flowers are in full bloom, and so it made for some nice pictures.  Let me share.

Going from left to right, you have an Alberta Spruce, which has grown quite large, some lilies in the back that have not bloomed yet, then the spring superstar a peonies in full bloom, behind that a couple of roses, along the back on the right a string of day lilies which will flower all summer.  Just to the right of the statue are some tulips which have lost their flowers, and in front a selection of flowers which might be dianthus. 

Hail Mary, full of grace
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.