2023-04-19 A Meditation on Trials

“You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.” (Mt 7:16–20 ESV)

There is some “already” built in to our life’s long litany of “not yets”. Before we’ve solved the problem, before clarity has mocked our efforts, before entering the fray for real this time, we are assessed and called New by the Gospel. The Gospel is there in the harrowing times.

Each of us has our cup of tea. Each of us knows what sad things we clasp or clutch onto, perceived safety from the fray, avoidance mechanisms. Yet to enter the corner, the fight, the bell ringing to start our day’s fray, is to bargain with a trust fall that says, you will emerge different for the efforts. You will emerge tried and tested, a different person than when we went in: this is our center of being, our Gospel uncovered, our hope lived into.

Resilience is a quality of character that finds its nourishment in such hardship. It is to be untired and glad in the midst of trials. It is a sanguinity others will feel about us, like a magnet both for favor and for dislike. We do aim to testify to this, that God is with us in the corner, in full answer to our questions: today, not tomorrow; today, not when the work is done; today, not when the future horizon finally greets us; today we will celebrate.

We celebrate simply the pain felt in maddening impossibility, thought mocked, pure ideas evading any effort to pin them to some one statement, to some one testimony. We see the haste and ambition, competition and backstabbing, daggers and self-assertiveness, immediately avail themselves upon any actual trial in life. Sure, we also know camaraderie and do love the brotherhood and sisterhood. But we evade and go helter-skelter and emerge somewhere else, situated elsewhere psychologically, than where we first went in. We bless with our mouths but hoard. We speak kind words, but have no fidelity come time for the fight. We live our life trying to make Gospel witness some safeguard to prevent ever really needing to “feel” anything. We try to avoid that bedrock of Jesus’ own Cross. We try to make a perch via good works and a laundry list self-check-up.

A check-up, a laundry list, can be good, but we must also recognize the sage or parent who only hears sin in whatsoever we boast in, lest it be the Cross of Christ. We must know the elder statesman who teaches us sincerity come time to mouth the words of confession. We must harp upon the times when spirit denies our desires, times of mystery and confusion, times of harrowing loyalty tests, real dynamics exposed, and questions of the new person who in meekness suddenly is “there for us”. At times. In their innocence, uncommon but found in the wild sometimes. We can begin today upon that war of coping, that war of more than coping: of celebrating and living into Victory. They will know us by our fruits: those fruits, we trust, are in the juice come time of battle. They are in a desire outwardly—towards others—to share good things, and inwardly—towards ourselves—to be sharp and tried and tested.