Branching Out?

“I am the vine and you, the branches. Abide in me and bear fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15.5).

Funny thing about vine branches. It’s hard to tell one from another; where one ends and another begins. I’m reminded of this every time that I try to uproot a well-established, but wild, extraneous vine branch. Grabbing it, after much tugging (and a sore back!), I discover I only have in hand a small part.

Jesus references vine and branch as a metaphor for his fellowship with his followers. However, I perceive universal, existential applicability to the community of humankind. We – whatever our country or clan, locale or language, philosophy or theology, history or destiny – are interconnected. What affects one, for good or ill, effects all…

Even more, no one, truly, stands alone…

Still more, the fruitfulness of the branch depends on its remaining attached and not on its own inherent fertility. (Who hasn’t observed that a fruit-or-flower-bearing branch, when removed from the vine, withers and dies?) So, in the human community, our productivity (especially I think of the fragrant, flowering fruit of love) is contingent on our connectivity to and with others, not on our individual, unaided creativity.

Always, it sorrowfully amazes me how, historically, we humans, in defiance and denial, fight against this fundamental, immutable aspect of our creation; preferring to lean toward and cling to our prejudicial, sometimes brutally lethal individualistic ideologies.

© 2022 PRA

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