Shirin McArthur
Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.
—Deuteronomy 7:9
Dear Siblings in Christ,
There are several transformations taking place in my neighborhood. Giant octopus agaves are sprouting “bloom spikes.” Each tall stalk will produce numerous blossoms that will become tiny little octopus agaves—and then the entire plant will die, leaving those baby plantlets to fend for themselves.
When I think of plants bearing fruit, I tend to think of peach and apple trees, which flower and fruit every season for decades. Agaves, however, put all their energy into one spectacular bloom and then die, exhausted by the process.
We also have aloes blooming in our neighborhood. These may look like agaves, but they are quite different. Aloes bloom yearly and form small plantlets around the edges of the outer leaves. This allows aloes to reproduce without killing themselves in the process.
As I think about the season of Lent and God’s invitation to spiritual transformation, these plants illustrate how we can make different levels of commitment. Some fruit is cyclical, like peaches and apples. Other fruit is sacrificial, like the agave. (This reminds me of the joke about a bacon-and-egg breakfast: For the chicken, it’s a day’s work. For the pig, it’s a life commitment.)
Our life’s work can also be either cyclical or sacrificial. Most of us are called to the cyclical bearing of fruit: the literal fruit of our bodies or the figurative fruit of our paid or volunteer work and ministries, our kind or cruel words, artistic endeavors, books written, lessons taught, wisdom shared.
A few of us might be called to bear sacrificial fruit: those who fight our nation’s wars and wildfires, who volunteer to be human test cases for new vaccines. Regardless of whether they end up dying, their full commitment to the possibility is the same as the agave’s. Their deaths might not be definitive, but their commitment must be.
Jesus made that level of commitment out of a faithful love that has its roots in God’s Deuteronomic covenant. He embraced the calling to bear sacrificial fruit (even if it scared him, as we learn it did in the Garden of Gethsemane). As you ponder your Lenten journey, what level of commitment are you willing to make? What transformations are taking shape in you in this season? What fruits are you called to be bearing?
Peace,
—Shirin
A version of this message first appeared on my blog on March 4, 2018.
