November 8, 2021

Abide: A habit of perseverance

During the pandemic, I started buying houseplants: succulents, a banana plant, a ZZ plant, a Chinese money plant, a new peperomia. My mother was a plant-grower, and I inherited optimism about my own plant-growing abilities. I remember buying our first houseplant after we were married—an English ivy. I remember setting this plant on the top of our particle board bookcase. I didn’t choose this spot for any organically good reasons. I just liked how the ivy climbed down the bookcase. I had no idea whether this ivy was a shade plant or a plant requiring full sun, whether it was a plant that liked to be regularly watered or dried out in-between. Months later, when the leaves of my ivy grew webbed, I had no idea it had been infected with spider mites. My ivy died—and when I replaced it with a couple more ivies, those died, too.

For some obvious reasons, I took a twenty-year hiatus from plant-growing. I suppose it’s also true that I was busy growing other things, plants that have grown their own long legs and arms by now. But the pandemic provided the perfect excuse to try growing houseplants again. I was home. I could keep them regularly watered. I could pay them a little more regular attention, deciding whether there were getting too much sun or too little; too much water or too little. Not all my plants have survived, including the daylily in my bedroom that I did forget to water—but some have, which feels like a small triumph.

It’s probably true that these recent horticultural attempts have me paying more attention to the green things in Scripture. Maybe it’s also true that I’m writing a book about time and beginning to understand how mechanical categories for our bodies—like efficiency and productivity—are doing violence to the way we inhabit the hours. We will find far more helpful ways of understanding ourselves (and our relationship with time) as we consider the lilies, for example.

Just yesterday, I was studying John 15 and falling into a rabbit hole of viticultural research.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.

I am the vine; you are the branches.

This is a passage I’d already studied for A Habit Called Faith. In that book, I write:

“The first lesson to draw from the metaphor of the vine and the branches is about our relationship with God. If sin has to do with habits of autonomy, faith has to do with habits of dependence. As branches, we survive only insofar as we are nourished by the elements of life passing through the vine. To be a Christian implies vital connection to Christ. On the one hand, this is another picture of the intimacy that God has longed to enjoy with his people. In the story of Israel, he made his home in their very midst. He was never cold and aloof, unwilling to be bothered by the tedious affairs of human beings. He drew near.”

I continue to think that this is an important way of interpreting this passage, that we’re being invited to depend on God for everything and to cultivate connection to the living Christ. In this sense, abide can mean remain, rest, make your home in, dwell. But yesterday, as I studied this passage again, I noticed another verse a little further down, one I hadn’t paid as much attention to before: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.” This proposed a second way to think about this verb, abide. It’s abide as endure. Digging a little further, I learned this Greek word, abide, provides the root for another word, which means to bear up courageously under suffering.

I started to imagine new possibilities for this familiar passage:

Persevere in me, as I persevere in you.

If you endure in me, and my words endure in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

What this starts to do is widen the scope of time. We go from resting and remaining today, to enduring and persevering over what might be a longer season of suffering, even the suffering of this long life. In my study of acedia, which I wrote about last week, endurance was often proposed as an antidote to sloth. The idea was that just as you wanted to give up on the burdens of your vocational calling, just as you despaired that any of your work mattered, that was the very moment you had to keep going. And as you did, you were slaying the dragon of acedia. You were continuing in faithfulness.

 “Among St. Benedict’s favorite words are perseverance, steadfastness, and patience,” Esther de Waal writes in Seeking God. “When so much of the spirituality on offer today seems to hold out the prospect of self-fulfillment and progress . . . the tough-minded realistic honesty of St. Benedict is refreshing.”

The gospel hope of these verses isn’t that we must muster up our own staying power, our own strength to endure. No, these are provided by connection through the vine and cultivated by the vinedresser. God himself is seeing to the fruitfulness and enduring faithfulness of his people, and he’s doing this for his own glory.

Remain in Christ. Let his words endure in you. Persevere in his love.

He has chosen us to bear abiding fruit—fruit to feed the world.

Yours,

Jen