The analogy of vines and branches that is spoken of in today’s Gospel extract, has a strikingly relevant ring to it, even in the Ireland of 2012. Particularly so indeed, in these challenging financial and other circumstances! How often do we hear of people finding life these days to be ‘a tough graft’! Tough, that is, in terms of not being able to draw up/down the necessary strength or resource to be able to cope! The notion of grafting something is what we usually associate with husbandry of vines, trees, plants or branches.
Grafting allows the horticulturalist to tap into the root and draw from it in order to improve or increase the quality of produce. Keeping with that analogy; we too, whether we like to admit it or not, are also ‘grafted into’ some thing, some one, some profession, some belief or other, from which we try to draw our purpose in life as well.
When you hear the offer like ‘I am the Vine, you are the branches’, made in the name of the God of Love in that context, it seems to offer so much more than just a pious platitude! It offers a life “to the full” and not just a living for a while!! That can’t be all bad as we come out from a number of years when we all knew too many people, during that time, who were so busy ‘trying to make a living – that they almost forgot to make a life’.
And of course there’s the other timely resonance of today’s Gospel as well in a completely different context! The need for ‘a branch to remain part of the vine’ (or not to), in altogether different circumstances is pretty much in evidence all around us these days! With so much recent coverage of people being cut-off from Political Party membership, losing the Deputy Leadership, the “whip” being removed from others, not to mention what the headline writers liked to call the “gagging” of yet other voices! Even a Radio Journalist was fired because of his criticism of the station owner!!!
Then there’s the high profile calls for resignations from ‘high office’ for sins of omission in the past, by some people whose own sins of commission in or around the same time 40 years ago, could have others demanding the same question of them. Having been grafted into some Sticky, Official or Provisional ideologies, looking to North Korea, Libya or even Moscow every bit as enthusiastically as others looked to Rome, it would seem that the link between an individual and ‘head-office’ is something worth recognising – in its absence as well as in its presence – in the past or in the present.
A O’N