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Clinging to the Vine
Sometimes people think of spirituality as being happy or fully alive. But for people in painful circumstances, the immediate challenge is not to be happy or glad; it is simply to survive another day until some semblance of flourishing becomes possible, if at all. Spirituality is not joy or peace or compassion or wonder, it is fortitude: courage amid pain and adversity - being able to say, despite the adversity, nevertheless I will survive.
In order to become a strawberry, you must cling to the vine, sometimes holding on for dear life. Spirituality isn't just the strawberry, it's the holding on.
Marianne Moore's poem "Nevertheless" is an ode to courage, to fortitude, to holding on, allowing the sap of creative transformation to flow through your veins as pure endurance. Endurance is a verb not a noun. It is an act of co-creativity, of you and the Holy working together.
In process theology God is the vine and also the sap that flows through your veins. God is the struggle to endure and the strength to endure, preparing the way for a strawberry to emerge if it can, but beautiful even if it can't.
- Jay McDaniel
Nevertheless
The Spirituality of Fortitude
Nevertheless
by Marianne Moore
you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,
a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food
than apple seeds - the fruit
within the fruit - locked in
like counter-curved twin
hazelnuts? Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant -
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't
harm the roots; they still grow
in frozen ground. Once where
there was a prickley-pear -
leaf clinging to a barbed wire,
a root shot down to grow
in earth two feet below;
as carrots from mandrakes
or a ram's-horn root some-
times. Victory won't come
to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till
knotted thirty times - so
the bound twig that's under-
gone and over-gone, can't stir.
The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there
like fortitude! What sap
went through that little thread
to make the cherry red!
by Marianne Moore
you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,
a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food
than apple seeds - the fruit
within the fruit - locked in
like counter-curved twin
hazelnuts? Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant -
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't
harm the roots; they still grow
in frozen ground. Once where
there was a prickley-pear -
leaf clinging to a barbed wire,
a root shot down to grow
in earth two feet below;
as carrots from mandrakes
or a ram's-horn root some-
times. Victory won't come
to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till
knotted thirty times - so
the bound twig that's under-
gone and over-gone, can't stir.
The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there
like fortitude! What sap
went through that little thread
to make the cherry red!