Yielding Fruit in Due Season

The Mass readings for Friday of the second week of Advent include Psalm 1. A fairly short Psalm, it lauds the person who “delights in the law of the Lord,” who meditates on that law “day and night.”

The Psalm goes on to describe such a person as “like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season.” It’s a lovely image for Advent since it emphasizes fruition — but also waiting.

One of the challenges of living in our wired, fast-food society is that we are used to having everything we want now (or pretty close to now) — so much so that the notion of waiting for “fruit in due season” seems almost foreign. Indeed, a few years back a book about globalization highlighted this tension in its title. Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree contrasts the Lexus (a luxury car symbolizing conspicuous consumption and therefore the global economy) with the olive tree, symbolizing a traditional economy. Some olive trees do not begin to bear fruit until they are 60 to 80 years old. Talk about waiting! The person who planted such a tree would not live to see it bear fruit: it was a gift that he or she gave to their children and grandchildren (and on and on, since some olive trees live to be 2000 years old).

Waiting requires trust; it requires letting go of our human thirst for control. When we wait for God to work slowly in our hearts, transfiguring us from the inside out, we are like that olive tree, slowly cultivating patience even though we may have no way of seeing what fruit will come in its due season. This is why so many of the great contemplatives use imagery of darkness and unknowing to describe the dance of responding to God’s love.

To trust God means accepting that we don’t have everything under control, we don’t have all the answers, we don’t have it all figured out. We simply consent to God’s hidden action in our lives. When we do not see what God is up to, we wait. We trust. And in doing so, we know by faith that we will, by God’s grace, yield fruit in due season. Even if that “due season” is a long way away.