Fruitful Contemplations: An Intro

I probably don't know what I'm getting myself into. But I've been thinking about fruit of the spirit, lately.  And when I start thinking about something, I want to write about it as a way of exploring my thoughts.  So here's the start of my thinking, and we'll see how far I can get in this list. I may abandon it, or I might come out the far end with some new insights. In any case, it's worth starting the adventure.

Just to remind you and me, here's the passage I'm contemplating, found in Galatians 5:22-23:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Against such things there is no law.

As I look at this list, some context is in order. The apostle Paul had just finished advising the Galatians to live by the spirit and not gratify the desires of sinful nature. Then he took time to outline what those sinful acts look like:  sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissension, factions, envy, drunkenness, orgies ... and the like.  It's quite a list, kind of reminding me of a bucket of snakes.  Ugh.  And a few of those items are things that I know personally on some level.  Ugh again.

So we have all this icky-ness that comes when we live to please ourselves.  And then Paul lists what spiritual acts (i.e. living in the Spirit) look like. It's list that I will always see in my mind's eye the way my elementary school teacher taught them to us:  each word listed over a felt representation of a fruit, put up on the board one at a time as she talked about the fruit of the spirit.

Nice. But now I'm a grownup and this fruit is no longer representative fruit on a felt board. Instead, it's a checklist of outcomes that are challenging, a way of assessing whether I'm living in the Spirit or not. Now I squirm. I squirm because it feels like the older I get, the fewer of these fruit I see hanging on the limbs of my life's tree.

I once tried to sit and meditate daily on these verses, hoping that they would work their way into my soul and become a reality in my life.  I'd sit on my flowered couch where I had worship and think about Love, saying it over and over in my mind and trying to experience it until I felt love in my soul.  Then I'd add Joy to that, meditating and imagining joy until I was feeling joyfully loving.  And then I'd try to infuse that with Peace, and so on. Each time when I reached the end of the list I was in a muddle of feelings, not knowing which was what, but hoping the "fruit" had all mixed themselves together into a cocktail that would make my life "good" for the day.

Well, it's time to go deeper. It's time to examine these one at a time and try to understand them in more than a magical, mythical emotion-wrought way.  I hope it will be a good experiment.  I hope you'll "taste" along with me and find something of worth.  See you back here soon.