The Soul, the Vineyard, and Little Foxes
“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
Our souls are vineyards planted by God the Father and watered by the precious Blood of His Son.
We are all called to be an unsullied garden, but we were also given free will—and we often make the wrong choices, choices which leave the gate of our soul open to intrusions of the evil one. The foxes enter, “the little foxes that make havoc of the vineyards” just when “our vineyards are in flower” (Song of Songs 2:15). The foxes seek to trample our flowers, those blossoms of grace that will grow into rich fruit if we are steadfast and diligent, determined to catch anything that might lessen our fervor for a relationship with God.
“[Eternal Truth] made us as His vineyard, where He wants to dwell by grace if it pleases the worker of this vineyard to cultivate it rightly and well. For if it were not well cultivated but were overrun with thorn and brambles, it would be no pleasure to live there.”
(St. Catherine of Siena, Letter T321)
The “worker” of the vineyard is our free will; God longs to fully dwell in our vineyard, but He’ll only do so if we align our free will to His holy eternal will. When we align with His will, we open the gate of our vineyard to receive the graces He longs to cultivate within us. The Divine Mercy of God has given us all the sustenance we need for a rich harvest; the vines are nurtured and watered by the precious Blood of His Son. “In the center of the vineyard the Master has put a jug, the heart, filled with the Blood to irrigate the plants so they will not wither.”
If we don’t align our free will with God’s will—if the worker doesn’t cultivate the vineyard rightly and well—we’ll yield wild grapes only (Isa. 5:2). If we don’t open the gates of our souls to God’s nourishing cultivation our vineyards will become a wasteland, “not pruned or hoed, and briers and thorns shall grow up” (Isa. 5:6).
Again quoting St. Catherine of Siena, if we allow “the venom of selfish love” to poison and corrupt the worker of the vineyard, it “produces either deadly fruit or wild and sour fruit.” This causes the vineyard to become “disgustingly ugly … a thicket, with thorns of pride and avarice, with brambles of anger and impatience … this garden isn’t enclosed but wide open, and so the enemies, the devils, come in as if it were their home.” This is the opposite of how we should be; when our vineyard is healthy and our worker immersed in God’s charity, rejecting all selfish self-will, then our Bridegroom can truly say to our soul:
“She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride; a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain.
(Song of Songs 4:12)
When we allow the Gardner to place seeds of truth in our hands, when we follow His will and plant where and how He so lovingly asks, the seeds will sprout in abundance. Nourished by the holy Blood, they obtain all they need to grow into plump, sweet grapes. At harvest the Gardner becomes the Divine Winemaker. We give to Him the grapes that we, through His grace, have harvested. He crushes them under His precious feet, extracting the bountiful juice, turning our empty nothingness into wine—rich, intoxicating wine to be poured out for the benefit of our neighbors, to all those wedding guests in need of our Lord’s nourishing goodness.
Indeed I am the gardener, for all that exists comes from me. With power and strength beyond imagining I govern the whole word: Not a thing is made or kept in order without me. I am the Gardner, then, who planted the Vine of my only-begotten Son in the earth of our humanity so that you, the branches could be joined to the Vine and bear fruit.
(God the Father to St. Caterina, Dialogue 23)
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