Christ the Vine (Homily by Fr. Cassian)
Today Jesus offers the image of the vine. We read, we reflect, we ruminate. We allow the image to resonate within, making connections to our life, to other texts. We rest within our meditative insight.
I have never worked in a vineyard, but I know vines.
As a child I lived with a grape arbor – an arching lattice from which drooped Concord grapes. We competed with birds for a taste.
In my father’s garden, there were always tomato vines wrapped up stakes
.
I have also known vines without fruit: such as the slender vines in gardens which, when pulled up, reveal their insidious length, hidden under the earth.
Wisteria wraps around an oak tree; climbing year after year, producing grape-like clusters of lilac blossoms: delicately beautiful – and adamant to live.
Georgia gives us kudzu. Insistent and grasping, kudzu will completely cover any object in its way, smothering and taking the shape of large trees and garden sheds.
Such vines teach tenacity and perseverance, qualities Jesus has in mind when he tells us to remain in the vine. Vines persist in living.
Our families are like vines, growing through the centuries. Each marriage is a grafting of a branch from another vine adding a new flavor to the fruit.
Our Cistercian Order is a vine, planted in Burgundy in 1098. Fairly quickly the Order received grafts of Benedictines eager to adopt the new observances; some were taken aback by the rigors of Cistercian pruning.
After 1789 Cistercian monasteries were radically cut and thrown in fires, but a few shoots growing from a root in Switzerland spread out to North America. The vine of our Order, often dangerously pruned, has endured through the tenacity of its life.
There is, however, another monastic vine – that of the thoughtful reading and ruminating on scripture. This textual vine appears unsubstantial, yet may be more real than kudzu.
Reading scripture is the foundation of monastic prayer. Scholars have traced a rich vine in the copying and transmission of manuscripts. Tracing anomalies in word choice and mistaken letters uncovers branches of textual transmission.
We each carry this vine in our minds, this vine of our own reading and interpreting, bristling with interconnections and meaning. This interior vine is built from our own associations and understanding of texts over time, enriched by the offshoots from other readers. As we read the Song of Songs, we may graft on branches from the commentaries of Origen or Bernard or Rashi – or even Toni Morrison.
When we prayerfully read a scriptural text, the Holy Spirit injects life to sharpen the words into a two-edged sword cutting into our heart the particular phrases we most need to hear. Our reading appears unsubstantial, invisible, intangible, but through the work of the Holy Spirit, the printed words become consubstantial with the living Word. We come face to face with Christ.
Our personal vine of reading intertwines with the Church’s vine of lectio. Here we see such pruning as centuries without Origen, until his insightful commentaries are re-grafted in an effort to balance the pruning shears of the historical critical method.
These our vines carry life as powerful as the life coursing through kudzu spreading out to cover the state of Georgia. But ours is a new resurrected life, more powerful than the botanical life of kudzu. Evangelists struggled to describe this life: life of the age, the kingdom, life eternal. Whatever it is called, this new life enlivens and transfigures the world, restoring God’s creation.
Within this transfiguring life, we truly live, drawn into continuing Incarnation. In the vine of this living Word, absorbed in monastic reading and prayer, we remain, we stay, we dwell. Within the living Word we abide.
Homily
May 2, 2021
