Ripening

The transformative and lifelong process of spiritual ripening.

When I was a young monk in the monastery of Gethsemani I shared with Thomas Merton that I felt frustrated and inept in my efforts to experience God’s presence in my life. In offering an encouraging word, he said, “How does an apple ripen? It just sits in the sun.” He went on to add that this does not mean that I did not need to continue in my efforts to seek God. Rather, it means I needed to live in a contemplative stance of receptive openness to God, achieving in and through my sincere efforts a spiritual fulfillment that I, by my own efforts alone, was powerless to achieve. This, it seems, is the intimate and mysterious nature of how we ripen in becoming a mature spiritual person. We ripen in holiness and spiritual fulfillment as we learn to sit in the sun of God’s mysterious, sustaining presence that energizes and guides our efforts, bringing us to realms of grace that are beyond, way beyond, anything we can achieve by our own efforts alone.

The transformative art of ripening occurs in the fundamental arenas of life. For example, when a young couple gets married, they look forward to what they hope will be a lifetime of love and happiness together. As the years go by, they ripen as they learn to surrender to a love that guides and fulfills their ongoing efforts to love each other. So, too, with the lifelong process of learning to ripen into a master teacher, or a gifted healer, or a well-seasoned artist or poet, or someone who serves the poor. Those who bless the world in the lifelong process of learning to ripen in such noble endeavors are those who have mastered the art of sustained effort, infused with a surrender to hidden sources of grace that give their efforts a richness or fullness that transcend what their efforts alone could attain.

The lifelong process of ripening brings about a corresponding ripening of our ability to understand the fundamentals in a wiser, peace-giving manner. For example, when people who believe in God go through painful experiences, they are troubled. They say, “If God watches over me, how could God let this happen to me?” This is such an understandable response to suffering in the life of those who trust and believe in God’s providential care. However, as a person ripens in unsayable intimacies in God, they ripen in a paradoxical wisdom. They come to understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. This is the Mystery of the Cross that reveals what ever it means that God watches over us: it does not mean that God prevents the tragic thing, the cruel thing, the unfair thing, from happening. Rather, it means that God is intimately hidden as a kind of profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself—and will continue to do so in every moment of our lives up to and through death, and beyond.

As fruit ripens, it fulfills itself in reaching its full potential to nourish and give us pleasure. We might say that, as fruit ripens, it fulfills itself in nourishing us. In a similar way, we do not undergo the transformative process of ripening for ourselves alone, but rather that our transformed presence might be a source of nurture to others.

Then too, there is the fruit that, in remaining unharvested, falls onto the ground and dies. The lesson here is in Jesus’ words, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it brings forth fruit a hundred fold, a thousand fold” (John 12:24). And so it is with us. As we grow old we realize that, in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this we feel immensely grateful. We know, too, that our inevitable passing away, in which we fall into the ground and die, is not the end of our ripened and transformed life. It is rather our passage into an infinite and deathless fulfillment. Saint John of the Cross talks about a windfall of delight.

When fruit becomes very ripe, the slightest wind can cause it to fall to the ground. This is also true of us, and not just in the sense in which we learn to be undone and fulfilled in all the unexpected little blessings that come to us throughout the day. The windfall of delight pertains as well to our last breath, which we know and trust will send us falling forever into the deathless depths of God.

As I end these reflections, what comes to mind is a painting by Paul Cézanne of ripe fruit. Juicy—almost, we might say, voluptuous—with a quiet, nurturing fullness, waiting to be seen, waiting to be eaten and enjoyed. May each of us continue to ripen into this quiet fullness, for God’s pleasure, for our own pleasure, and for all whom we might help in any way we can. ◆

Finley, J. (2013c). Ripening. Onening, 1(2), 37–39.