We ripen in holiness and spiritual fulfilment 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 lifelong process of ripening brings about a corresponding ripening of our ability to understand the fundamentals in a wiser, peace-giving manner. . . . 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 whatever 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 fulfils itself in reaching its full potential to nurture us and give us pleasure. We might say that, as fruit ripens, it fulfils itself in giving itself to 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 fulfilment. Saint John of the Cross [1542–1591] talks about a windfall of delight. [1] 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.
References:
[1] John of the Cross, “The Dark Night,” in The Poems of St. John of the Cross, trans. John Frederick Nims (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 19. Note: “Windfall of delight” is Nims’stranslation of John’s line “¡o dichosa ventura!”
James Finley, “Ripening,” Oneing 1, no. 2, Ripening (Fall 2013): 37–38
