rishi
The Symbol of Fruit (#4 of 5)
Posted on: 05/28/2009 21:55
I
When I returned from Asia to Canada and joined the United Church, I discovered that many people in my congregation were more interested in what I could share with them from my background in Buddhism, than anything about Christianity. And I guess that's understandable, because Christianity was something they had already been engaged in for some time, but Buddhism was new and different for many of them. That's what they wanted. And so, the first contribution I made to my congregation was to offer a small group called “Exploring Buddhist Spirituality.”
It was my first experience teaching Buddhism outside of Asia, and it was quite an eye-opener. On the first night of the group, everyone came in and sat down in a circle at the front of the sanctuary, where we were meeting. We introduced ourselves, and talked briefly about why we had come. And then I gave a little overview of Buddhist spirituality, about how it is a kind of training.... that, traditionally, starts with learning the art of relating to other people, what Buddhism calls “virtue training,” or “character training.” It involves practices that help us to really pay attention and listen to others, respect their boundaries, and relate to them in ways that they find helpful. Then, the training expands to include the art of meditating... And finally... to the art of reflecting on sacred teachings and their relevance in our lives. So after I gave that little summary, I asked the group if they had any initial questions or comments.
There was a woman there about my age, named Carol, sitting directly in front of me in the circle. She was a first grade music teacher, and a member of the UCC, from a nearby congregation. And the moment I asked if there were any questions, her hand shot up, and we began to have a conversation that has stayed with me ever since.
She said: “I'm not sure how to say this... I'm really frustrated. I've been going to church basically since I was born, and frankly, I've had enough. It all just seems to come down to the same basic program that I learned in Girl Guides 30 years ago, about being 'nice.' The reason I came here tonight to find out about Buddhism is because I'm looking for a spiritual way of life that is not just more platitudes about civility and being a 'good person.' But after hearing what you just said about training in 'virtue' and developing our 'character', it sounds like this might just be more of the same old thing that I've been getting at church all of these years.”
I thought to myself: “Welcome back to Canada!!!” I believe I really did understand her frustration. And I didn't want to frustrate her any more than she already was. But I felt I needed to challenge her a bit, and so I suggested to her that, whether it's in Christianity or Buddhism or Girl Guides, or somewhere else, real civility has deep roots, and it's not that easy to develop. If it were, our world would be in much better shape than it is. And I tried to express more clearly how, in the Buddhist perspective, cultivating virtue is not about some set of platitudes that ignore reality, but a real art that requires considerable awareness. It's about perceiving the subtle, emotional quality of our communications and our actions in relation to others, and responding in ways that are truly beneficial for everyone involved.
And she responded: “I understand what you're saying, and I agree with that. I'm a teacher. And over the years, I've worked hard at developing my communication skills, becoming a better listener, becoming more empathetic, more assertive. These are things that I've learned outside of church – at seminars and workshops. And it's all good. It's all helped me to be a better, happier person. But something that has always been missing for me in those kinds of training has been a spiritual dimension. I want to understand and experience how Godfits into all of that. Or is God maybe just an “idea” that the Church and other religions use to get people to behave in more 'civilized' ways?”
So I suggested that there was no quick answers to her questions, but that, if she stuck around for a while and learned to practice the Buddhist path, I thought she would find what she was looking for. And she did stick around, for over 5 years, and participated in all of the additional training groups that I offered.... until one day, when she decided that she had gotten what she came for, and that she wanted now to recommit herself to her Christian faith. So she joined a new congregation in the United Church, where, the last I heard, she is very engaged and content.
It was a curious experience for me – getting to know Carol. I wondered why it was that she hadn't gotten what she needed spiritually within her church. Was the spiritual depth that she was looking for just not there? Or was it there, but maybe she just needed some different insights, some different tools, to uncover it and benefit from it? Her story reminded me of my own journey, which, for over twenty years, had led me away from the Church and into other spiritual traditions and other parts of the world, and finally led me back again, with a renewed vision and commitment.
II
Sometimes, in the Church, the symbol of fruitfulness can get so watered down that it comes to mean little more than having good manners and following conventional standards, like saying “good morning,” not swearing, getting good grades, and so on. I think that was part of Carol's dissatisfaction with the Church. And rightly so, because the symbol of fruitfulness points us toward a much deeper kind of civility than that, one that enables us to live together in authentic community, actually relating to one another with love and justice. Real spiritual fruitfulness cannot just be manufactured in the way that cars and computers and good table manners can.
Bearing good fruit is the culmination of a long, delicate process of growth. It's a process that requires special conditions, a lot of hard work, and, some farmers would add, divine blessing. In today's gospel reading (John 12:20-33), Jesus illustrates this mysterious growth process for us, using a grain of wheat.
He describes how the single grain of wheat must fall into the earth, and in a sense, die – die to its identity of being nothing more than a solitary grain... because that is not its true potential. Once that tough outer shell is surrounded by the moist, good earth..... that shell breaks down, and through its remains emerges a new green shoot, one that will bear much fruit. Jesus was speaking here, both symbolically, and from personal experience, because this is the Way he lived his life.
The quality of the love,that he manifested didn't happen by accident. It was the natural (supernatural) consequence of his ongoing experience of surrendering to the Divine.... as Water....., Spirit...., and Fire. These symbols guided his life; they were his daily bread. Again and again, surrendering to God as Water and as Spirit, he broke through the tempting illusions of the ego and discovered his true spiritual nature. Again and again, surrendering to God as Fire, he came to actually embody that spiritual nature in the 'ups and downs' of his everyday life. This was the program that Jesus taught his disciples to help them cultivate a character like his, a character that embodied divine peace and love and justice. Surrendering to God as Water, Spirit, and Fire – that was the key to growing into our true potential as human beings.
It was a simpleLife Program, but not an easy one... by any stretch of the imagination, because all of that surrendering required an enormous amount of trust. We just don't surrender to persons or forces that we don't really trust... which is pretty smart. We can try surrender without trust, but we always hold the core of ourselves back. So... how can we get enough trust to fully surrender to God as Water, and Spirit, and Fire?
Well, if we consider the story of Jesus' life, it seems that this level of trust comes only through the Fruitfulness of others. It was through the fruitfulness of his own character, that Jesus was able to transmit to all who were open to it... the awareness that God was trustworthy... that God was Love itself and had nothing but good intentions. So that they could know, inwardly, that it was safeto surrender to God as Water, Spirit, and Fire... Jesus knew this inwardly, of course, because he had been doing that surrendering, repeatedly, in his own life. He could prove that God's love was limitless – not through logic and reasoning—but through the fruit of his own character... which people could feel and taste and no one could argue against. People came away from him experiencing that same depth of trust that he did, and that trust in the goodness of God, enabled them to surrender to God as Water, Spirit, and Fire, in their own lives, over and over again, in one area of their lives, and then another, and another, so that, over the course of their lives, they too became more and more like Christ. And as theirfruitfulness increased, it would engender trust in others. And on and on it went. A kind of spiritual reproduction. (But where did Jesus get his trust from in the first place? Well, in the ultimate sense, it all comes from God. But maybe God's Way of imparting much of that trust was Mary, his mother. That's usually how it works...)
III
Of course, that was then....thousands of years ago. What about now? Have our experiences in the Church, and the Life Programs that we have learned there, enabled us to bear that kind of spiritual fruit? Enabled us to become more whole, more happy, more Christlike in our lives? My friend, Carol, when we first met, quite frankly said “no.” That's why she had become so dissatisfied. The Church she experienced seemed to have lost its real, living connection with the tradition's guiding symbols. It seemed to have lost its grasp of what those symbols actually mean in real life experience.
I think that Carol knew, intuitively, that spiritual fruitfulness was something that people cannot just “produce” on demand, simply because they “should,” or simply by deciding to or willing to. She sensed that there had to be some dynamic spiritual growth process behind it. But she felt that in her church experience she wasn't getting that process, that program... just a lot of direction to 'get out there' and... 'be kind,' 'be loving,' 'be just', and so on... but what she wanted to know was how...
If you were raised in the church, you were probably taught “how”. Maybe you remember from Sunday School or Catechism, getting a little coloring book, with a tree in it, something like this one I found on the internet:
It's based on a well known passage by St. Paul in the book of Galatians, where he describes nine fruits of the Spirit:love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And you got to color in all of the fruits, and the roots, and the trunk of the tree.
And if it was a really well designed coloring book, it probably said something at the bottom, like this one does -- “Rooted In Divine Love”. That's an important addition, because then it makes even more sense as a spiritual symbol. Then, we can get a feeling for how, if we are deeply rooted in the loving Ground of all Being, whether we call that Ground “God” or “Allah” or “Krishna” or “Higher Power,” or something else... we are going to bear fruit.... And the fruit that we bear is going to be of the same quality as that Divine Nature we are rooted in. Not a bad message for kids. One change I would make in it, for adults, would be to include something about “awareness”:
Because awareness is really key. Even if Divine Love is radiating throughout the universe, it really doesn't matter that much to me, subjectively, if I am not aware of it. (And why would I notbe aware of it? Well, perhaps because of a lack of fruitfulness in the lives of those around me...) When we add this piece about awareness, it enriches the symbolism further, because then we can see that the depth of the roots, symbolize the depth of a person's actual awareness of the reality of Divine Love in his or her life. (Not just whether they believe in a Loving God as a concept... which is good; it's just not enough to produce this kind of fruit.)
A phrase that I have always liked to describe a person whose life is very rich in these “Fruit of the Spirit” qualities is that they have an “old soul.” I like that because having an “old soul” doesn't necessarily have to do with how old a person is in calendar years. Sometimes we meet very young people who have very “old souls.” Their lives radiate love and peace and kindness. They treat others justly, the way that they would like to be treated. In our tradition, Jesus is the prototype of a person with an “old soul,” a person whose roots ran very deep, into the very heart of God.
The other side of this is that when the spiritual roots are not so deep, and the soul is not so “old,” then the fruit is not so desirable. The fruit grows bitter or becomes rotten.
To include this other side, we would have to change the drawing a bit. These are fruits that emerge not from the depths of the Spirit but from the more superficial level of the ego ('ego' here refers to that disconnected state of mind that St. Paul called, “the flesh,”-- 'sarc' --which is not the same thing as the physical body – swma. Paul considered the physical body to be the temple of the Spirit). This fruit-tree symbol can even help us to definethe ego for ourselves. We could say that, spiritually speaking, the ego is that state of mind or sense of identity, where a person's spiritual roots are still so short, that they can't yet reach, can't yet tap intothe reality of Divine Love. And so the fruit gets malnourished. The fruit on the top of the tree reveals the disconnectedness down below the surface. When our spiritual roots are short in some area of our lives, our fruit in that area has that inedible taste, where life is “all about us,” where, unless someone is useful to us, they'd 'better get out of our way.' This is the fruit of a “young soul.” Whether they're 5 or 85, they have very little awareness of the reality of Divine Love in this area of their lives, and that lack spoils their disposition in this area. Among biblical characters, Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus,would probably be a good prototype of a “young soul”-- at least in the areas of his life that were written about in scripture.
If Jesus actually understood himself and others in this way, maybe that is part of why he was able to not hate his enemies...even Judas... because he understood that what made them so disagreeable was that they didn't have a clue experientially about the reality of Divine Love. He didn't see anything inherently wrong with them; he saw them as having the same potential as he did; they just had very short spiritual roots. Lots of growing to do. Maybe that was part of what enabled him to say things like, “Forgive them Father; they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
So then the big question becomes....
How does a “young soul” become an “old soul”? How does a person with very little awareness of the reality of Divine Love... become deeply rooted in that reality and fulfill his or her ultimate potential as a human being? How is the Fruit of the Spirit actually cultivated in our lives? What's the process? What's the program?
It's not by magic....
It's through a process that the Church has called by many names over the years -- “Christian Development,” “Spiritual Formation,” “discipleship,” “sanctification.” The Eastern Orthodox churches call it “divinization,” our becoming divine. But the understanding within all of these words is that there is a process of development, through which we become more and more like God. And the milestones on that spiritual path of development are not laid out once and for all in a very concrete way, like some are in physical development. Instead, they're described in very broad strokes, in symbols. The sacred symbols through which God's love transforms our lives, over and over again, day after day, year after year, from one context to another, and another, and another.
The challenge is that these symbols of transformation – Water, Spirit, Fire, & Fruit – don't just “float” into our awareness. They are transmitted to us by the ordinary human beings like us, who make up the Church. And we transmit these symbols to others the same way – the only way that they really can be transmitted – not by Powerpoint – but through example, through the real story of our lives... those living values that always come through in how we actually relate to one another.... through our fruit, in the language of symbol.
We're always transmitting these spiritual symbols to one another, to the extent that we have come to embody them in our own lives. That's what made Jesus such a powerful transmitter. He embodied a fruitfulness that people could actually taste, because he had actually experiencedGod, over and over again, in many different contexts, in the ways these symbols describe. So they weren't just concepts to him; they'd become a living part of who he was. So whether he was just having dinner with tax collectors, or reading in the temple, he was always teaching Water, Spirit, Fire, and Fruit... just by the Way he related to life.
And that is the great challenge of being the Church....... How do we respond to the “young souls” in our midst.... whether they're 5 or 85...? How do we respond to people whose roots have a lot of growing to do, in some area of their lives, or maybe in many areas of their lives?
Miracles can happen when “young souls” drop into it a just and loving community, like when a grain of wheat drops into the good earth.... that tough outer shell starts to soften until, in time, it just naturally falls away, and in its wake a new green shoot starts ascending, new roots start descending, and a new life is on its way to becoming an “old soul,” one that, in time, will bear much fruit for other “young souls” that will be drawn to its light.
Let's pause for a moment of silent reflection on our own needs for Water... for Spirit... for Fire... and for Fruit.
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