We're Living a Pruned Life—whether we want to or not
A few years ago I listened to a short talk from Andy Crouch on living “A Pruned Life,” in which he spoke about friction, tension, and the pruning that leads to better and truer growth. This morning I remembered Walter Brueggemann’s line from Sabbath as Resistance: “The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.” Both of these wise teachers are saying the same thing: we cannot have good, true, healthy growth if we do not practice limitations, not just the limitations the world sometimes thrusts on us (poverty, sickness, division, etc.) but sometimes limitations to which we willingly bend ourselves.
Right now we are being pruned but good. Little sprouts are being cut before they take their first gulp of springtime air. Green and fertile branches are being chopped at random. Our whole bodies are flinching from the shears we see coming. Pruning hurts and we know it’s going to be a long time before we’re bearing the fruit we want to again. Even though we know there’s a good outcome (either in the short term—a flattened curve, or the very, very long term—a recovered economy), neither gives the kind of comfort that unbridled growth seems to give in the moment.
A friend asks how I’m doing a few days ago and it takes a minute to answer. How am I doing? Have I stopped to think about that for longer than a second or two before moving on to the next thing? “I think I’m doing okay,” I say. “I think I’m finding a new normal.” The weeks feel monotonous in some ways, the same Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays ad nauseam, my brain rewiring itself into new grooves. We are malleable people, people who adapt and evolve and heal and remember and remind and remove until we find a way through. God made us this way, in his grace. So it’s a new normal, I think. Not an easy one, but still.
I am taking comfort in the structures that these limitations are forcing upon us. I listen to the same short morning podcast from Bridgetown Church every morning. They’re enough to jolt me out of whatever sleepy stupor I’m in and catapult me into my day. I began using the Monk Manual two weeks ago and instead of viewing it as a planner in which to record and plan my oh so busy days, I’m using it as though I were a monk in a monastery, cloistered away, the work of my hands and my heart my primary work. I’m going outside every afternoon in my hammock and every evening when we finish our workday to sit on our front porch. I’m about 1/3 of the way through the chronological Bible I started reading in January. I’m restarting a sourdough starter, even though it would have been easier to get one from a friend, the rhythms of its needs keeping me awake, alert. I’m using the Streaks app, pressing my finger down on the rudimentary habits like “Take a shower. Drink water. Read your bible. Sit in the sun. Take your vitamins, etc..” I am watching the orchard of grays multiply atop my head. I am teaching writing and editing and trying to write for my own self too. I am also learning there is a strange absence of the pulsing obligatory feeling inside of me which shouts of what a disappointment I am to my friends and family almost constantly. When the noisiness of others’ expectations is tamped down, muted, I begin to sense a newness, a sense of who I am again at my core.
This is what limitations do to us. They remind us of who we are at our core. They simultaneously reveal the spaces in our bodies, minds, hearts that we like to keep hidden, while at the same time revealing the spaces in our bodies, minds, and hearts that we didn’t know were hidden at all. I am revealed to be both worse than I thought and somehow better, too. I remember who I am without the trappings of fill in the blank.
I have always known I exist more healthily with a smaller life, fewer social engagements, less talking, more being. Some people thrive off of activity and people and influence and engagement; I am not one. But I think even in this moment even the introverts among us are facing how much we have tried to control our environments, space, and allotments of peace. We are, all of us, banging into the limitations of what this pruning means.
I love that Brueggemann quote because what is happening right now is that our restlessness is being thwarted. There is almost literally nothing we can do with it except fall into our humanness, our createdness. We are not sovereign, we are not God, and we are not going to be okay. I mean, we are, some of us. But most of us will not be okay. We will heave with the collective grief and shudder the shakes of a post-cry mourning. We will not be unchanged by these circumstances. We are being chopped, remember? Change is imminent.
But change can be good and I’m praying, hoping, believing that it will be shown to be good somewhere along this continuum. I’m praying these limitations force growth and bear the eventual fruit of a well-pruned life. I’m praying these small habits prove to be so good for us that we cannot envision an “other side” of this without them. The daily walks. The “at-home date nights.” The sourdough baking. The togetherness of family. The remembering of singles. The frugality of our spending. The awareness of the sick and old. The sun coming through the branches of the willow tree from which my hammock swings. The collective grief. The forced rhythm of Sabbath. The remembering of who we are and who we really aren’t and who we wish to become.
