By Mary Morrell
A deep-rooted lesson in faith, fortitude
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream. It fears not the heat when it comes, its leaves stay green; In the year of draught it shows no distress, but still bears fruit.
— Jeremiah 17:7-8
Whenever I have faced a real obstacle in life and haven’t known how to handle it, I have always found that a walk around the block was just what I needed. The exercise is always good, of course, but inevitably it has always been the lessons of nature that brought me to my own solutions.
Take, for example, the amazing, ancient wisteria bush that has grown along the fence on the side of my house for more than 50 years. Wisterias are vigorous, twining bushes with large flowers that cluster and hang like grapes. They are known for their hardiness, but I have no doubts that this particular bush would have withstood the 10 plagues of Moses!
In my time, it has been trampled by dozens of little feet, run over with the lawn mower more times than I can remember, been covered up and nearly suffocated by a dumpster and even struck by lightening! The only part of the bush left after that looked like a burned French fry sticking out of the lawn. I was upset, of course, but under the cold October ground that little bush was whispering, “Oh, ye of little faith!”
By the spring, its wispy green leaves were pushing through the earth, around its petrified former self and creeping up a nearby fence and light pole. Its growth upward has taken it over, around and through a variety of obstacles but none of them were sufficient to halt its progress.
With every walk around the block I would notice some new green here, another inch there, and it would bring to mind a question I believed God was asking of me one day in prayer: “What is your root?”
Certainly the wisteria had a physical root deeply entrenched in the earth, from which it was able to absorb all the nutrients it needed to stay healthy, but on another level this was a plant that seemed to know its “self”, that came back again and again because it had one goal — to give life to its essence, its core, in spite of any obstacle.
Humans are not always so single-minded. Their progress is often interrupted or impeded or brought to a grinding halt by woundedness or by fear. It is the nature of humanity to stumble over their human limitations.
But when we are fortunate enough to be reminded that our root is divine, not simply human, then the obstacles can become challenges on our journey of becoming, challenges that will take us over, around and through, just like the wisteria.
Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
To be rooted in Christ — our source, our foundation, the center of our “being” — means there will always be beautiful clusters of flowers along the way of our “becoming”.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law