This essay is Part 5 in a series that explores how the New Testament, along with Christian mystics and saints, reveal God’s presence in creation, the body, and the whole of life. Part 4 can be found here. The aim is to explore how we might live a life that is not merely devout, but permeated. Not to understand God in theory, but to touch Him in the real… and thereby live more deeply in union with Him.
“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” —Jesus Christ
We do not perish because our longings are too great. We perish because we refuse to receive. Humanity collapses, not from the excess of desire, but from the starvation of grace.
Look at the frantic structures of our days: the sleepless labor to carve out a name, the desperate scratching at the stone of time to leave some inscription, the clutched fragments of dust which we crown and call “permanence.” All of it is born of the same exquisite lie—that life is to be manufactured, not given. We ache to be the fountainhead, yet we are not. And it is this refusal to be branch rather than root that breaks us at the secret seam of the soul.
The heart knows this, though the mind rebels. It is why every triumph tastes of ash in the mouth, why each treasure festers in the hand, why even love can curdle into possessiveness. We cry out for communion, yet recoil from the binding vine. We thirst for rootedness, but scorn the humility of soil. Ours is the age of citadels… souls shuttered in glass and steel, defended and untouched. And so, though fortified, we are sterile. Incapable of leaf, incapable of fruit.
Into this desolation the Christian mystics speak with a simplicity so striking it silences. Teresa of Avila sees the soul as a castle of infinite chambers, each blackened until we fling open the door to the One already enthroned within. John of the Cross insists that the lamps we build must gutter into smoke, that only in the holy dark will the true Light disclose itself. Augustine confesses what we all know in the marrow: the heart is restless, and its restlessness is no flaw, but the watermark of its design.
This is no mere ethereal flight from the world, but the foundation of Incarnational mysticism—the stunning truth that the divine life is not to be grasped at in some distant heaven, but received into the very fiber of our earthly being. It is the ultimate sanctification of the material: the pulse of God in the branch, the sweetness of eternity in the fruit of a forgiven heart, the Infinite condescending to flow through our finite, twisted forms. This does not call us out of the world, but into its deepest truth: that it is a vessel for the sacred, and so are we.
Into this unrest, the words fall. Not suggestion, but command, and within the command, the only promise: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.”
This is no metaphor for the pious but the anatomy of our being. The branch cannot strain itself into fruitfulness. Its only vocation is to remain—to cling, to consent, to surrender to the flood of Another’s life surging within. Severed, it remains a branch in shape, but not in soul. Wood without pulse, form without future. So too the human cut off from Christ—capable of beauty, even brilliance, yet emptied of eternity, incapable of yielding what will not rot.
And note this: we are not likened to grapes, the visible sweetness of the harvest. We are likened to the rough and twisted conduit. The branch has no beauty but what passes through it. Its glory is its very yielding.
But abiding is not stillness or a sterile form of stoicism, but circulation. The vine is never idle. Sap rushes from hidden root to sunlit leaf, from dark soil to luminous fruit. To abide is not to stagnate, but to be swept into this current, carried in a rhythm not our own. Prayer is not request but immersion. Contemplation is not withdrawal but plunge into the bloodstream of God.
Pruning is not punishment but dilation. The knife that pares back does not destroy, but widens capacity. The wound becomes aperture. Through the cut, the sap flows stronger. So too the soul. Its hollowed losses, its scars of grief, its failures carved into the grain—these are not voids, but vessels. Grace moves fiercest through what has been broken open. The very place of laceration becomes the root of fruit.
This is why abiding is the hardest surrender. It feels like diminishment, yet births abundance. It looks like helplessness, yet is the ground of strength. It feels like being stripped bare, left desolate, emptied beyond endurance—and yet this nakedness is the only posture in which God can fill. The branch that resists the knife may look lush with leaves, but it remains barren. The soul that resists surrender may dazzle with accomplishments, yet bears nothing eternal.
And we know this in our hidden hours, when prayers ricochet into silence, when consolation drains away, when existence feels like a night unending. These are not absences. They are the pressure of deeper abiding. The Vine is flooding life into us where no eye can see, not even our own.
Abide in me, He whispers. Stay when everything in you cries to flee. Yield when you burn to seize control. Do not sever yourself in winter’s barrenness, for the sap is already moving—even now, especially now—in the depths unseen.
And then, without our notice, without our effort, fruit appears. A forgiveness that astonishes us, because it is not our own. A tenderness toward suffering that was never in us. A courage that bears no trace of our will. These are not our virtues. They are His life in us, fruit swollen from a Vine that never ceased its flow.
This is both the scandal and the splendor: that abiding costs everything, yet what it yields is nothing less than the very life of God, coursing into us, making our mortal frame a dwelling of eternity. We do not merely live near Him. We live because of Him, and at last, in Him. The miracle is not power at our command. It is communion—branches, ordinary, twisted, rough, yet charged with the sap of the Divine.
To abide is to discover at last that life is not our possession. It is gift. It is flow. And in surrendering, we find the fullness no fortress can contain, a life that death itself cannot drain.
Thank you for this Steve - it really resonated.
I wrote this to a friend last week:
This is not a test of how much you can endure. Gethsemane was not a trial; it was a birth.
Surrender is born again and again wherever we feel the tearing. Yet the joy that follows—holding the unconditional love that surrender delivers—softens the memory of pain.
Our hope rests in God’s purpose: that each small yes joins the great Yes, and the universe leans a little further toward love because of one act of trust.
With that hope, we can believe that “all things work together for good.”