Overview:

Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

A Reflection for Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Remain in me, as I remain in you.
Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own
unless it remains on the vine,
so neither can you unless you remain in me.
I am the vine, you are the branches.
Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit,
because without me you can do nothing. (John 15: 4-5)

Find today’s readings here.

I am, it’s fair to say, getting on in years. One of the surprise revelations of old(er) age is the continuing unspooling of personal delusions not even of grandeur, but of maybe “grander.” I thought I was, if not wise, at least smart. But life conspires to rid a fella of such delusions. Fortunately humility is a grace.

My own missteps and errors become clearer, self-mythologizing unravels; old pains I have inflicted still provoke a twinge of shame. This can be a salubrious exercise as long as I don’t move across the short ground that separates acknowledging regrets from wallowing in them.

How did I ever miss so much that was, well, in retrospect so completely obvious? Faith, for instance. Finding it, exploring it, keeping it, helping it grow.

It’s an understatement to say that I was imperfectly catechized. A child of the 1960s and ’70s, I can recall at least three (four?) different liturgical missals thrust into my hands as my parish grappled with the starts and stops of the immediate post-Vatican II era.

Somehow amid the confusion of instruction and practice, maybe heavily larded with afternoon black-and-white movies on WOR depicting reverent, heroic saints and spirits of the past, I got the idea that faith was a gift, a something suddenly that happens to you, unearned, unstruggled over. A holy ghostly surprise that will fix me, fix everything.

I can almost see that finger-wagging Dominican sister my mother frequently invoked: “You get out of it what you put into it.”

My faith has been an unruly, undependable thing; sometimes it’s been a stranger to me for months, even years, and even when I’m “feeling it” the most, I just about never escape a thomasian doubt nagging at my skeptic psyche.

The idea that faith is something I should have a cooperative hand in building had not strongly settled in until I reached the should-have-known better part of life. Of course, faith is not something that lands on you; it’s something you do and something you live. What do I have to do in prayer, in scripture reading, in silence to remain in him? How can I bear spiritual and temporal fruit without that remaining? How can you transform, with him, each trudge in life into a moment of grace?

I sometimes get a little uneasy with that talk of finding a personal relationship with Jesus. But there it is in Scripture, inviting me in. Like in all relationships, the work of maintaining it can’t be one-sided. Both partners have to make an effort to nurture it and help it grow to fullness.

The mystical body is something I am a part of but also something I join and participate in. I have to remain in there, struggling through with everyone else, looking for Holy Spirit signs and the good works that I can accomplish in this one precious life, the harms I can untangle, the good I can do, the prayers I can make to remain closer to him.

It’s not too late for this doubtful branch to bear fruit.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).