Jul 23 – Memorial for St. Bridget of Sweden, Religious
Coming from a noble yet religious background, St. Bridget (1302-1373) was friend and counsellor to many priests and theologians of her day. As chief lady-in-waiting to Queen Blanche of Namur, she counselled and guided the Queen and King Magnus II. She was harassed by others at the court for pursuing a religious life.
She eventually renounced her title of princess and became the foundress of the Order of the Most Holy Savior (Bridgettines), chastening and counselling kings and Popes Clement VI, Urban VI, and Gregory XI. St. Bridget encouraged all who would listen to meditate on the Passion, and of Jesus Crucified.
- Patron Saint Index
Gal 2:19-20
Jn 15:1–8
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser… Make your home in me, and I make mine in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit all by itself, but must remain part of the vine, neither can you, unless you remain in me.”
I have always read this passage as a gardener might — admiring the imagery, nodding at the wisdom, and moving on. This time I read it as a branch.
That is a different thing entirely.
A branch does not produce sap. It does not feed itself. It does not, by any effort of its own, manufacture the life that flows through it. All a branch can do is stay joined to the vine and let the life come. Everything I have been taught to value — competence, initiative, carrying the load, being the one others can rely on — none of it is the branch’s work. The branch’s only work is to remain.
I needed to hear that this year.
The first thing this passage says about the Father is that He is the vinedresser, and that He prunes. Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. I used to read pruning as correction — God cutting away what is wrong. But that is not what the text says. The branches being pruned are the ones already bearing fruit. The cutting is not punishment for failure. It is attention paid to something healthy, precisely because it is loved and meant to bear more.
I have been pruned this year. I did not choose it and I did not enjoy it.
The hospital weeks cut me back. They stripped away the illusion that I could manage everything by my own strength, on my own schedule, in my own controlled way. They forced me to drop things I thought I could not drop, to lean on my parents, to let others carry what I had always insisted on carrying myself.
And then, when the worst of my wife’s crisis had passed — after the ICU, after the ablation — the pruning came for me directly. I caught a severe dose of Influenza A. It wiped me out completely. I was in bed for more than thirty hours, unable to move, unable to do anything for anyone. Two weeks on, the fatigue still has not fully lifted. I, who had spent weeks being the strong one, the steady one, the one who carried, was reduced to a man who could not lift himself off a mattress. There was a strange and humbling lesson in that. The vinedresser had cut me right back to the root — to the place where there was nothing left to do but lie still and be held by a life I was not generating.
It felt, at the time, like loss. Like being cut. And maybe it was — but I am beginning to see the vinedresser’s hand in it rather than only the blade. The pruning exposed how much of my fruitfulness I had quietly attributed to myself. It cut that back. And in the cutting, it pointed me toward the vine.
Apart from me you can do nothing.
I have read that sentence a hundred times and treated it as an exaggeration. Surely not nothing. I can do a great deal — I do a great deal, every single day. But this year taught me how thin that “great deal” really is. When my wife was in the ICU, all my competence could not heal her. And weeks later, flattened by a virus, I could not even care for my own body, let alone anyone else’s. I stood, and then I lay, as a man who could do nothing. And in that powerlessness, I found; strangely, that I was not abandoned. The life was still flowing. It simply was not coming from me. It never had been.
That is the relief hidden inside the hard words. Apart from me you can do nothing is not a threat. For a man who has spent his life trying to be enough for everyone, it is permission to stop pretending he is the source. The vine is the source. I am a branch. My job is not to generate the life. My job is to stay attached to the One who does.
And I cannot read this season without seeing the vinedresser’s timing in it, too.
The flu came after the ablation, not before it, and not during. It came before my wife’s trip to Amsterdam to deliver her paper, not in the middle of it, when she would have been alone in a foreign country. My wife, the children, and my father all caught it from me — but each of them was diagnosed in time to take Tamiflu within the window. I had passed the forty-eight hours and could not. And yet even there I see grace: it was I who absorbed the worst of it, the one most able to bear being laid low, while those I love were caught in time. I had also, months earlier, postponed my professional exams from July to January — clearing from the path the one commitment that would otherwise have collided with all of this. I did not know then why I felt I should move them. I think I understand now.
None of this is coincidence to me. The vinedresser knows where to cut, and He knows when. The timing of our trials is never as random as it feels from inside them.
Then comes the command, repeated like a heartbeat through the passage: abide. Remain. Stay.
I am good at striving. I am not as good at abiding. Striving feels productive; abiding feels passive, and everything in my temperament resists passivity. But abiding is not passivity. It is the most active trust there is — the deliberate, daily choosing to stay rooted in Him rather than running on my own reserves. This year my reserves ran dry, completely, down to a body that could not move. And in the dryness, I learnt what the branch always knew: the life was never mine to manufacture. It was only ever mine to receive.
The promise at the end is generous. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you… you will bear much fruit. Not fruit I squeeze out of myself by working harder. Fruit that grows, almost without my noticing, because I stayed connected. The most fruitful thing I can do is not to do more. It is to remain.
I do not want to waste this year’s pruning. The temptation, now that the worst has passed, is to rush back to the old way — to pick up everything I set down, to prove again that I can carry it all, to mistake my own striving for fruitfulness. But the passage is asking something quieter of me. It is asking me to stay close to the vine even when the crisis is over. To carry less and abide more. To remember, on the ordinary days, what the hospital corridors and the sickbed made undeniable: that I can do nothing apart from Him, and that this is not my weakness but my truest freedom.
I am a branch. The Father tends me. The cutting was love. The timing was His. The life is His.
My only work is to remain.
(Today’s OXYGEN by Gerard Francis)
Prayer: Lord, give me a heart that remains open to placing myself in your hands.Thanksgiving: We give thanks for the messages you deliver to us to guide
OXYGEN 
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