God the Graft

The skill of grafting, a choice but tender apple variety onto a common but hardy stock is an ancient one: more ancient than the skill of skin grafting as a medical practice, so that is seems likely that the botanists have taught the biologists a thing or two in their time! Both skills are intriguing, inspiring and incisive in the contribution they make to the quality of life. Both are also painstaking for the botanist or biologist, and painful for the subject, plant or human.

“Make your home in me, as I make mine in you” is on face value an attractive invitation in its associations with loneliness, hospitality and belonging. In the context of the image of the vine and branches, however, it takes on that more incisive association of grafting and being grafted. To apply the image to my relationship with Jesus is to explore the development and deepening of my coming to belong to him.

It is a painstaking process, for the Lord and for me. There are no shortcuts, no quick fixes. God cannot be short circuited, even though our “instant coffee culture” would have me think otherwise. Relationship takes time, requires a generous giving of prime time, so that God’s gift of grace grafted into my life may grow. The pain of prayer and praying is the price I must pay if the graft is to gain ground and grow gradually.

Essential to the success of grafting in both the botanical and biological spheres is the removal of matter which may inhibit or infect the graft from taking. Pruning too is painful, cutting back on what might be termed “suckers” to use the botanical term, whatever it is that sucks the life of God from my tender growth. The suckers are many and shoot up with startling swiftness to smother the God graft - secularism, consumerism, sensuality, selfishness, cynicism and so on.

Sometimes, it seems, the odds are stacked securely against the graft of God in me but I can take heart from the Lord’s patient and painstaking plan - “it is to the glory of my Father that you should bear much fruit”. The plan is God’s, the purpose is fruit that will last, the process is painstaking, but the promise is a powerful one and the divine botanist plans to persevere. 

Fr. Eamon Devlin, CM

14th May, 2006