Every Advent, living in the southern hemisphere, my family and I gather in the abundant harvest of plums that our various plum trees grow. It’s become something of an Advent tradition, where decorating the house to mark the season is accompanied by also clambering through the often thorny branches to separate what the birds have pecked at from the many that we can still bring inside to eat. Today, as we marked the first day of Advent with this harvest, my wife noted how much the tree needs pruning, while I pricked my thumb on an adjacent rose bush. “I’m sure there’s a spiritual metaphor in this,” I said, and on reflection I think there is.
Whenever I collect fruit from our trees I’m reminded of Christina Rossetti’s words in “A Birthday”:
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit…
Rossetti might have been describing the arrival of someone you love, but critics with an ear for the spiritual in her work often see something else implied: an Advent of something much bigger than human love, “the birthday” of her “life”. As I pluck plums off our “boughs…bent with thickset fruit”, the thorns that prick me remind me that the fruit I long for is Not Yet. Right now, fruit and flowers grow alongside thorns. One day, there will only be fruit, no thorns.
This Advent, I invite you to join me in prayer: for the fruit we long to see flourishing, and for the thorns we long to see fade.
Come, Lord Jesus.
The Consolations of Writing 