Of Jesus and Blackberries

I have been out on the garden this evening. I should clarify: my wife loves to garden. I love to harvest. The cost of the opportunity to harvest is the grunt work in the garden.

That said, there are parts of our garden that are entirely mine. Our back yard, in what was a suburban neighborhood 75 years ago, isn’t big, but it is packed. In that space are blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and a peach tree. Those are mine. I will help my wife plant and care for beans and tomatoes and eggplants and peppers, both sweet and hot (and a little exotic); but those are hers. The berries and the fruit tree are mine.

Which gave me a certain perspective on the lessons for this past Sunday (RCL) on the vine and the branches. Blackberries were particularly apt; especially the thornless ones (yes, I have both thorny and thornless) because they’re really more vines than stakes. Blackberries only bear fruit on second year wood. That is, a new stake or vine grows in year one, puts out leaves, and grows, but it doesn’t bear fruit. It will winter over, and then bear fruit the second year. And having borne, it will not bear fruit again. Those canes or vines may well put out leaves again, but they will not flower or bear.

That puts me to work in September. (I could perhaps do it sooner, but that’s when I usually get around to it.) I have to cut out the old stakes that bore this year and tie up the new stakes that grew this year. I also have to prune them back, lest they grow too high or too far to be managed in the space I have. There is a particular cost to this. The thorny blackberries exact a cost in blood – never much, but always some. I have become quite deft in threading a hand back among the stakes and vines to reach that berry at the very back, but one way or the other – reaching in or drawing out – I will brush a thorn and be pierced. I have become pretty good as well at tracing each stake, each vine, back to the point where it breaks ground, so as to remove it completely; but they don’t want to come. Whether I try to take them whole or cut them into segments, they will grab or pull or tangle, and they will get a piece of me.

Now, Jesus was talking about viniculture – grapes grown for wine and for the table. I have also lived with grape vines, both wild and domesticated. They take work if you want to get good harvests, year after year; but they don’t bite. It is easier, too, to track each growth tip back through its branch to the vine stock. Whether natural or grafted in, the branch tracks back to a visible vine.

But blackberries are different. The vine, in that sense, is underground. Each year’s new stakes and new vines break ground individually, or grow off a root that barely breaks ground itself. They grow prodigiously – often eight or nine feet in the first year. They tangle and intertwine, apparently competing for the sun, and yet developing a lattice that is self-reinforcing. Often I don’t even have to use twine for the loose ends. I simply entangle them in a way that allows one to support another. And, as I have said, they certainly bite. To love blackberries requires a willingness to take the pain.

Jesus was talking about viniculture. But I wonder whether he would have spoken of blackberries had he been talking today. There are some differences that wouldn’t work, perhaps. And I will admit that I don’t find at all comforting the thought that it is the canes that have borne, and will never bear again, that have to be pruned away entirely. At the same time, the isolation of each stake, even as all the stakes entangle in a way that becomes mutually supportive, sounds a lot like our denominationalism. And we are certainly arrogant, seeking to grow prodigiously as if the sun itself could be our own. But the best part, or at least the most apt, is the fact that to love the fruit, to gather and claim it, takes a cost in blood – that is too close for comfort, and entirely too close to ignore.

“I am the root stock, and you are the stakes; and as troublesome and thorny as you can be, to gather you in I am willing to bleed.” It’s not the same; but it sure has a certain ring to it.