FRACTURED FABLES: The winemaker

In so many ways, my life is like making a fine wine. Let me count the ways.

• Christ is the vine, and I am the branches.
• I can bear good fruit if I get over my pride and choose the way, the truth, and the life, instead of my own predilections.
• I must use my humanity, with its tendencies toward original sin, to choose what seems a daily contradiction to my reason and select the cross instead of what I think life should be.
• Ironically, it is only when I abandon my human nature and seek to have in me the mind of Christ Jesus, (Philippians 2:5), that I open up that nature to the possibilities of achieving what it was intended to be, an adopted son (daughter) or the Father and heir to the kingdom of God.
• Good fruit only comes from good plants (not rotten ones).
• I must be vigilant to keep myself (and my grapes) protected from the harsh conditions of draught, or pestilence. That takes work on my part.
• Like everything that exists, my growing season has a beginning and an ending.
• There is a time for planting and a time for harvesting. There is a time to pick the product of my vines and a time to make wine.
• My grapes are those choices I have made that bear fruit; and, consequently, also the results of my bad choices with their consequences.
• I am the sum of my grapes; I am the grapes that must die to become a fruit to become a wine.
• I have a lifetime to grow under the Sun of vitality and to become what nature intended me to be. Life is more than just the physical and mental universes, but I can’t reach the last part of my intelligent progression without help to pull myself up to that final level of my nature.
• I pick the grapes and place them in the crucible of my life.
• I give thanks to the plant for helping me to become fully what I should become as a grape.
• Grapes won’t grow without being part of a plant. I won’t grow unless I realize that I am just a grape and not the plant (RB 7:10) I am not the plant but merely the branch on which may or may not bear fruit depending on me.
• I must join the Lord of the Dance in that huge vat of my life and crush the grapes for them to become something more than just grapes.
• Many, many grapes make a juice that must be strained and then left to ferment.
• Good wine comes from good grapes. I don’t know how to make wine.
• The Grand Winemaker, Christ, shows me how, when the individual grapes die, they are transformed into something with the fermentation (Holy Spirit). I am the only one to make my wine, as are you. Your wine is not my wine.
• Jesus tells me not to put my new wine in old sins, so I must have a penitential mindset.
• My Lay Cistercian Way is the way I have chosen to make all things new, and so I am a new wineskin as well as a new wine.
• When I die, Jesus will ask to taste the wine in my cup and offer me a taste of what my whole life is about, to love others, as I have loved you.
• Heaven is a grand wine-tasting party where I get to sample the wine from every other human, but also have them sample what made my life drinkable as a vintage wine.

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