but recognize the change.
I couldn’t hide my own surprise a few years ago in front of the leaders of a parish in another part of the county who were also experiencing an extraordinary amount of fruit. I had to tell them: “You do realize this is not normal, right? We have worked in hundreds of parishes and this is not normal.”
Their response was perfect: “It’s normal here.”
A Little Theology of Fruit-Bearing
When embarking on a journey, it is extremely useful to consult a map in advance. Think of this chapter as a very brief introduction, a Catholic map of fruit-bearing.
Theology is the exploration of God’s self-revelation, without which we could not know God. But what the Church calls God’s “economy” refers “to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life” to humanity in time and space (CCC 236). God’s economy is about subjective, or applied, redemption — that is, how God’s grace pours into our world and changes our individual lives, families, neighborhoods, parish communities, and whole cities. In the economy of God, when we walk obediently with Jesus as his disciple in the midst of his Church, you and I gradually become God’s “handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared” (Ephesians 2:10) and through which he reveals himself and communicates his life to the world. We become fruit.
In John 15, “fruit” (Greek: karpos) as a metaphor refers to a “deed, action, result, profit, or gain.”1 In other words, it is something real and concrete that most ordinary people can recognize as good or bad. The word “fruit” in Catholic Tradition is used to refer to a spectrum of related but different things:
1. The interior spiritual consolations that a person may experience as he or she follows Jesus as a disciple.
2. Fruits of the Spirit. Catholic Tradition follows the Vulgate (St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible) in listing twelve fruits: attributes or characteristics of the Christian life: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity.2
3. All personal internal and external acts of obedience and cooperation with grace.
4. What God accomplishes or offers others through our acts of obedience (the fruit of our fruit, so to speak).
(It is important to note that the impact of God’s provision made available to others through our acts of obedience depends also upon the spiritual openness of the one receiving it and that person’s response. The recipient has to choose to cooperate with the grace received through your obedience.
So, for instance, if a Christian author obeys the Holy Spirit’s prompting and writes a book urging people to help the homeless, that book is a fruit of her obedience. But, for her obedience through that book to fully bear fruit, somebody else has to read it and respond to the call of the Holy Spirit by actually taking action to help the homeless. The fruit of another’s response to the graces channeled through our “yes” can affect many lives. The fruit of the fruit of our fruit cascades out and touches many, including people we will never know.)
5. The person that you and I become through this lifelong process of cooperating with God’s love and grace is also fruit; the “everlasting splendor” that C. S. Lewis spoke of in The Weight of Glory.3
The accumulated impact of our acts of obedience is largely unknowable by us in this lifetime. Any apparent fruit that is visible to us or to others is only a small glimpse of the infinitely larger network of grace that encompasses all of time and space and is known only to God. We will begin to understand the mystery of grace only when we stand before him.
I got a glimpse of the “fruit of the fruit of my fruit” a few years ago, when I received a letter from a woman I had never met. “Emily” wrote that she had driven hundreds of miles to attend a Called & Gifted workshop put on by a small team in another state. As a result of the workshop, she said that she was in the midst of missionary training and would soon be sent to Africa to train medical personnel to receive and distribute AIDS medication. Emily turned out to be a recently retired pharmacist with an epidemiology background who had not known what to do next. She had never imagined becoming a medical missionary — until she went through the gifts-discernment process and realized that she might have been given a charism of Missionary. Emily wrote to thank me for the discernment process that changed the course of her life.
I was especially moved when I considered what God might do through her obedience. Emily’s part in making AIDS medication available throughout a small African country could save the lives of an entire generation and change the course of the whole nation. A few days later, I attended a parish gathering during which I had the chance to share Emily’s story. A woman across the table from me became very excited. She exclaimed, “Emily’s like Esther in the Bible! Who knows but that she was brought into the world for such a time as this?”
Of course! But aren’t we all?
The Vine and the Branches
Scripture describes the Church as both the Father’s cultivated field and as the vineyard in which Jesus is the “True Vine.” The Holy Spirit is the sap that runs between the Vine and branches.
In our Tradition, the imagery of fruit-bearing is used of both the Church and the Gospel. The Church is called the “Vine” because she is the mystical Body of Christ who shares in the life of her Head,4 while St. Paul writes of the Gospel “bearing fruit and growing” (Colossians 1:6). The life-changing power of Jesus the True Vine is communicated through his Great Story to those who are not yet disciples and to those who are. Speaking the name of Jesus has great spiritual power:
But the one name that contains everything is the one that the Son of God received in his incarnation: Jesus…. The name “Jesus” contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and salvation. To pray “Jesus” is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies. Jesus is the Risen One, and whoever invokes the name of Jesus is welcoming the Son of God who loved him and who gave himself up for him. (CCC 2666)
Jesus’ name actually contains his presence and whoever invokes Jesus’ name is welcoming him. Which is why naming Jesus with love and telling his story bears fruit. (And why it is sinful to take Jesus’ name in vain.)
The Vine and the Graft
You and I are not natural branches of the Vine. Rather, we are foreign branches grafted onto the Vine (see CCC 1988). What is fascinating about this image is that, in nature, the branch grafted on — not the rootstock vine — determines if and what quality of fruit is borne.
For instance, if I plant a white rose — perhaps a Pope John Paul II hybrid tea rose, which, by the way, has a gorgeous aroma — that has been grafted onto the rootstock of a red rose (as is true of most American roses), it will bear only white roses. But if my beautiful JPII graft on the upper part of the rose is killed by a Colorado blizzard, I will never see another white rose. The surviving root stock buried in the earth will be doing all the fruit-bearing from now on, and it is going to be red!
But in the Kingdom, it doesn’t work that way. In John 15, the Vine changes the spiritual DNA of the graft so that the naturally fruitless graft can bear fruit. In the heavenly Vineyard, the branch does not determine the quality of the fruit, the Vine does. Bearing good fruit is the evidence that the nature of the grafted branch has been fundamentally
