Growing Deep, Not High
Growth is not an absolute good. I live on a farm, which is how I know. When you put organic fertilizer on the squash and tomato plants, pigweed and musk thistle flourish right alongside them.
A seedling can get too excited by a nice rain and shoot up overnight; then the sun beats down for two days, and it shrivels away. The biggest fig tree can fail to produce a single fig, and pruning a grapevine can be the best thing that ever happened to it. Jesus told parables about all these things, which suggests there is spiritual truth in them. Wheat and weeds thrive on the same nutrients. Roots matter more than stems. Bigger is not always better. Cutting things back returns energy to the source.
For these reasons and more, I approach the subject of spiritual growth with some cautions in place, knowing how quickly the wish to grow can become the wish to win first prize. Maybe that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” He wanted the spiritually covetous people in his audience to think twice about their ambitions. Or maybe he just wanted to bless people where they were instead of where they thought they ought to be, based on the spiritual tycoons they saw sitting in front of them.
With that in mind, here’s a proposal for those who want to grow their spirits: look down instead of up. Most of us could use hardier roots, not bigger blossoms. Set your heart on sustainability instead of visibility. Imagine digging down instead of climbing up. As much as we have been taught to reach for the heavens, we might place more trust in the earth beneath our feet, where God has supplied everything we need to grow broad networks of roots with staying power for all the days to come.
If there is a catch in that proposal, it is that “everything we need” includes weeds along with wheat, strangers along with neighbors, breakdowns along with breakthroughs, and famines along with feasts. It includes everything that preceded us in creation, briefly enjoying God’s undivided attention before we arrived and mistook the divine gift of “dominion” over them for “domination,” allowing us to forget how our roots rely on theirs. If God is the source of the spirits we want to grow, then there is no such thing as a spiritual monoculture. The medium of our growth—in every direction—is the Spirit that gives life to all.
And yet that same Spirit plants us in different soils and climates, with different views of divine reality and different vocabularies for speaking of it, which makes it hard to say anything that sounds true to everyone all the time. One of my first growth spurts was to stop trying to sound like God and say something anyway, trusting the Spirit to translate as necessary. So let me tell you how the Spirit has blown me around, growing my spirit under its ever-changing, ever-surprising, and never-entirely-comfortable benevolence.
The most noticeable growth ring appeared when I stopped valuing what happened to me in terms of gain or loss. Before that, making a new friend was a gain that went into the plus column. Losing an old friend to death was a loss that went into the minus column. It didn’t take a genius to notice that pleasing things went into the plus column, while things I wished had never happened went into the other one. I even put people in plus and minus columns. Then I started noticing that most of the life-changing things (and people) were in the minus column. I still wished some of them had never happened, but there was no denying their power to transform me—and almost everyone else they touched—by showing us more reality than we wanted to see. While the plus column confirmed our values, the minus column upset them.
Given the choice between dropping a curtain over the losses or using what they revealed to revise my sense of reality, I decided that more reality was a plus, not a minus. This meant letting troublesome people cross the line into my private reserve of rightness. It meant standing at the grave and singing alleluia while still stupefied by grief. Spiritual growth meant giving up the idea that those things could be separated from one another.
Another growth ring appeared when I realized that skin did not separate my spirit from other spirits. In springtime, when I walked past a bush with a head full of new green leaves, I could hold my hand over it and feel its lush spirit lift mine. When I read certain writers—especially old ones, especially poets—their spirits sat down next to mine. When I took part in a mass meeting downtown, I could feel the spirits of the people all around me—including those who stood across the street protesting my protesting—swelling my spirit far beyond the boundary of my skin. Typing this even now, the choice of “my” sounds too small. “Our” seems like the only correct possessive pronoun for Spirit, which begs to be capitalized however small or unlikely its temple turns out to be. All those temples are connected. Also, who possesses whom?
The latest growth spurt came during the long sabbath of the pandemic, when everything stopped (in Hebrew, shabbat means “to cease”). Since I live on a farm and my working days are over, I had it easier than most. There was time to read, to cook, to prune, to remember birthdays and send sympathy cards. There was time to do nothing, which can be a very scary thing. Who are you when you’re doing nothing to earn your next breath? What are you worth when your doing days are done? Do you really believe in the unconditional love of God? These kinds of sabbath questions are fertilizer for the downward-growing spirit.
I went a little crazy while I was trying to answer them. First I started talking to dead people, calling each of them by name and telling them what I loved about them, which surprisingly included much of what drove me nuts while they were alive. Then I thanked them for the ways their roots intertwined with mine and how they grafted mine to others. I also talked to trees, rocks, and birds, who were sometimes my only conversation partners. The trees told me what it was like to be a witness, rooted to the spot no matter what was coming at you or what you had to see. The rocks told me never to be fooled by appearances, since they started out as red-hot magma and were on their way to being sand. The birds told me to look up how many times God shows up in the Bible as a bird and to get back to them if I had questions. That dove at Jesus’s baptism, they said, we know that bird very well.
It did my spirit good to wonder about my place in the family of things. What will my legacy be? How have my roots mingled with other roots in ways that will go on mattering? How has the Spirit in me honored the Spirit in all other beings so that I hear what they have to say? If someone had asked me to write this essay from the other side of the grave, I’m sure I would have different things to say to you. But from where I stand now, there’s only this: trust your life on this earth to take you deeper, and the higher part will take care of itself.
