"By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things." [Galatians 5:22-23]
I was walking in my back yard last night in the early evening, and the apple tree at the far edge of the property caught my eye. It seemed, at first, droopy. Its branches hung lower, it seemed, than usual. At first, for just a split second, I worried that the tree might be diseased, until I got close enough to see that my apple tree was neither sick nor sad--it was, in fact, being fully an apple tree in all of its apple-y glory. That is to say, its branches were bowed down low because they were heavy with the apples growing day by day on its limbs.
And it occurred to me in that moment that whatever care or energy I have given to that tree over the spring, or over all the years it has been mine to care for, all of it has simply been in the hope of letting the apple tree fully be what it is meant to be. Fertilizer or water, pruning and checking its branches from time to time, these are not acts of "charity" or "pity" for the tree--they are, rather, simply actions of love (I guess that is the right word, having been swayed by Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree from childhood). They are things you do, not because you feel "sorry" for a tree that has no fruit on it in February (it's not time yet for apples in February!), but because you want to let the tree fully be what it is, to allow it to do what apple trees are made to do, and to let that apple tree be a glorious apple tree. And an apple tree whose branches are bowed in graceful curves toward the ground because they are heavy with apples is glorious indeed. (The Hebrew word for "glory," by the way, comes from a root that means literally "heavy," the way we say something of worth has "substance" or "gravitas" to it, so, hey, I guess an apple tree, or whatever else, really can be gloriously heavy!)
Anyway, this was a whole new angle for me on the familiar words from Galatians about "the fruit of the Spirit" and the long list of virtues that Paul lists: love, joy, peace, etc. Paul's point here is to say that these are the kinds of things the Spirit of God brings out in us. And in that sense, these are all dimensions of what we are all meant to be--that they are all a part of what it means fundamentally to be human.
The old church father Irenaeus once famously wrote, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." Well, what does it mean to be fully alive? It is not a matter of having gone to enough parties or Caribbean cruises in a lifetime, or to have seen a certain number of sites on your bucket list. It's not about having more accolades on your resume, degrees on your wall, or money in the bank. To be honest, I know plenty of people who have been lots of places, partied harder than their peers, made and lost and made more fortunes, and racked up impressive titles... and still seem to have no clue about being human. Paul's list is means to give us a sketch: if an apple tree is fully and gloriously itself when its branches are heavy with apples, then we are most fully ourselves as we let our lives blossom into love... and generosity... and peaceable, gentle spirits rather than being pompous blowhards. To be fully human is to let ourselves be bowed down in graceful curves because our souls are heavy with fruit like that, too.
And if that is so, then it tells us something vitally important about the presence and work of the Spirit of God: the Spirit's work among us and within us is essentially to bring forth out of us what makes us most fully ourselves. It is a constructive role, a nurturing role perhaps, and a creative role--but it is the work of cultivating within us what makes us glorious--what makes us fully alive.
That means that the Spirit's presence in our lives isn't about pity.
I need to say that because sometimes it can sound like Christians believe God "needs" someone broken to "fix" in order to be God. It can sound like God is co-dependent and "needs" us to be needy, or that God sees us solely as miserable messes who are pitiable and wretched. This is sometimes the criticism of Christianity, too--that we secretly "need" there to be tragedies in the world for us to swoop in and make ourselves the hero to "fix" them, or that we cannot look at other people, near or far, as equals who might have something to share with us, but rather can only see others as poor, lowly messes for us to pity.
And, as you surely know from your own life, one of the worst things you can do to someone is to pity them. At least as a long-term posture, pity has a way of putting the other person permanently beneath you in your mind, even if the other person grows and thrives and succeeds. Pity has a way of ruining friendships and souring family connections, because it doesn't make room for the "pitied" to work through and grow past whatever made them "pitiable." On the flip side, sometimes the words we most need are the voice of the friend who sees us on the same level, eye to eye, as it were, and says, "You are not my project--I just love you."
And as I say, sometimes we get this picture of God that is basically one of pitying us--that God only sees us as miserable, pitiably objects of divine pity, who are only here to make God feel better by having us to "fix." We imagine that God's confession is like the line from the old Cheap Trick song, "I want you to want me... I need you to need me... I'd love you to love me." Of course, that may just be our way of projecting our own need-to-be-needed onto the divine, but we should be honest that we sometimes do imagine God this way... because we sometimes are this way. But if we consider this idea from Paul that the Spirit's presence brings forth "fruit" from us, that's not about pity. I don't pity my apple tree when I clear away a dead branch in the fall or put manure around it in the spring time. I just care about my apple tree doing and being what an apple tree is meant to be. I just want to let it be... glorious. I just want to let my apple tree do what makes it most fully alive.
The way Paul talks here in Galatians is much the same. The Spirit cultivates love in us--because love is at the core of human beings at their most glorious. The Spirit cultivates joy in us, because we are in our glory when we can rejoice in someone else's joy. The Spirit cultivates peace, and faithfulness, and all the rest, because, well, those are what make us most fully human. Not attractiveness. Not money. Not popularity. Not power. The Spirit's work in us is, in a sense, simply to let us get out of the way of ourselves so that we can be fully alive. God's intent is not to keep us all permanently infantilized, but to let us grow heavy with apples ourselves--which is to say, to let us be... glorious.
Today, the Spirit of the living God says to each of us, "You are not my project--I just love you."
Wow. You are so loved. Now, go... be glorious.
Lord God, let your Spirit draw out from us the glory of love, peace, faithfulness, and generosity. Make us to be fully alive in you.
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