The Greening in My Soul

What it took to get me "here"

Out of the winter of my soul has come a greening.  What was once dead, now feels alive. In short, a greening is when the  old, ailing Lazarus in us comes back alive. It is when the old, brown and questionable turns greener and greener until new growth results. It is the intention of all gardeners who prune, to not kill, but in the cutting back, the new; the green; the alive emerges in a vibrant and thriving fashion.

Upon arriving here a few months ago, in the soft mountains of the Blue Ridge, Gwen and I took a long hike along the Davidson River. As we walked deeper into the forest, we journeyed deeper into our hearts, as is often the case for us. As the river meandered, we did the same through the thicket of thought and briars of worry. One curve; another bend; a long stretch of small rapids, then a rock outcropping inviting us to sit down and talk.  The rustling wind and the faint sound of white water rapids up ahead made an ideal place to sit and talk.  In the days leading up to this walk in the woods, we had unpacked the boxes but not unpacked our hearts with each other.

We sat in silence and after I while I felt a rumble inside my heart. I got very still and felt this inner welling up coming from a dark abyss inside my chest. I cried out to Gwen—to God—to anyone within earshot: “Why did it take so long to get here?”

What I said was earthy. It was guttural. It was confessional. This primal question gave words to my groans.  Silence has a way of pulling out in us what needs to be extracted. My question revealed the illusion that, if we had gotten here sooner; if we could have by-passed the “hard” and somehow gotten a “get out of jail card”, then maybe, just maybe, I would not have needed all that pruning.  It was not the southern, genteel way a man speaks.  It was more like David belting out his consternation to God after disappointment. “Why did it take so long?” now seems like the opening line of a Psalm. It is the question we ask when perplexed by the ways and timing of God.

The spiritual life is not about luck; by-passes or escaping the “hard” of life. It’s about staying the course through the many seasons of life; the ups and downs and the highs and lows. The spiritual life is learning to go “through” and not around what befalls us on our journey home.

If there is any book in the Bible that best describes the spiritual life, it is the Psalms. In half of them, the writer is upset and troubled; lamenting and upset with God. In the other half, we read about exuberant joy, satisfaction of the soul and being content like a baby at her mother’s breast. It’s not either or. It’s a sort of marvelous and messy mixture of both: the good and the hard. Perhaps, this is why Jesus read and quoted the Psalms so often. Perhaps, this is why those of us in the liturgical church use the Psalms as our prayer book.

The Psalms provide a clue that we cannot short-cut our way to having the best life now (whatever that means). Actually, the Psalms provide for us, a sort of inner topographical map that marks a human being’s journey to God.  The map shows a deep and ever deepening path to God. By following the ever-changing map, our consciousness changes, as I’ll explain below.

All the “hard” of my pruning was somehow necessary, for me to now have a greening in my soul. Paul, the man who spent three necessary years in the desert—his pruning time—entered in one way and came out a whole other way. Hard times of desert or pruning changes a heart. Ask anyone who went into the desert in the loss of a loved one to a ravaging disease.  Could any remain the same after a devastating loss; defeat or time of pounding on the potter’s wheel? 

Most of the time, deserts and pruning change us. It changes nations. It changes churches.

In the desert Paul must have detoxed. In the desert, he must have lamented; In the desert, he must have reworked a bit of his theology. Some might think Paul should have stayed longer in that incubator of transformation to soften his views on some hot button issues of our times. But anyway, Paul’s pruning time must have softened him from being a reactionary, murderous leader to a more thoughtful human.  In a time of pruning, we can regain our humanity that we can lose along the way. We discover what Eugene Peterson call,s a “robust sanity towards life.”

In a pruning time: We unlearn—what we thought we knew and undestood.. We are unformed—what got ‘set’ and ‘fixed” in us is invited to unform. We are transformed—not the same.

This is the greening. This is the proof that the pruning time is not wasted.

The fact is this: I needed the last season of my life—that stump time—that season of dying. My pruning time was hard but needed. Jesus put it like this, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain.  But if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24).  Simply said, there were (and still are) parts of me that needed to die. There were parts of my soul that the waters of baptism must have never reached. Those dry, flaking parts of my inner world, that never saw the light of day, needed to just die and be pruned away.

All the dear souls of Scripture whose stories are told by someone that happened to be curious, noticed that God uses pruning to make men and women green.

All of these dear souls found a better day one way or the other (read Hebrews 11).  It was their faith that sustained them, we read in Hebrews. A deeper knowledge was cultivated in them and us that says:  when it is stump time; pruning time; desert time that  “this” is not the end.

The end is never the end.

Jeremiah, the old Jewish prophet who records more pruning knowledge that any other prophet in the Bible says it this way. Listen to the hard won wisdom he offers us:

When life is heavy and hard to take,
    go off by yourself. Enter the silence.
Bow in prayer. Don’t ask questions:
    Wait for hope to appear.
Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face.
    The “worst” is never the worst. (Lamentations 3: 22-23, the Message)

The end—the “worst”—as we think it, is never really the end. The end brings the green. This, dear friends, is the Gospel story. There realy is goodnews to world of stumpy people. There is life after death. The greening is the resurrection story of Jesus and the greening is our resurrection story. Perhaps many of the people we read about in the Scriptures might have said, “What took me so long to get here?”  But, somewhere in their writing and stories comes the revelation—it was necessary. All the pruning was necessary to get me here—to get us here.

Greening comes as we practice living with the soul in mind.  All the metaphors of pruning, desert and death remind us to live with soul in mind. Circumstances and material things are simply NOT where the action is, in the spiritual life. The action and blessing in the spiritual life is about awareness, awakening and attitude.

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I don’t want to reduce the pain of pruning and the death of the desert to an pithy, alliterated sermon. But, as I’ve sat with my own observations, I see four distinct movements that old and new saints describe when they emerge. Here they are:

The Four A’s of Pruning: Awareness, Awakening, Attitude and Action

These four “A’s” are the fruit of anyone who comes out of the desert; experiences a hard time and gets pruned. We become aware of what really matters. We awaken to the deeper issues of life. We surrender our anger and we surrender and our attitude changes. All of these signs of transformation: awareness, awakening and attitude then lead to another “A:” action We take action. Where there are stumps, we tell the story. Where there is death, wrong and a culture of stump like thinking, we show a better way. There’s a deeper motivation in our action after we are pruned. It’s really more about love and less about being right, I think.

We are aware of a greening. We awaken to life with a wider perspective and a deeper faith and our inner attitude changes to one sustained by more peace, more love and more life. Acting alive is my calling. Living alive is my purpose. This is the proof of greening.

(The photo of me holding the hydranga stump was taking by Gwen and this is the image I sat with for months to understand my pruning process. The image of the butterfly on the Butterfly Bush was taken by me on 8/12/23. )