Dead Limbs, Lucille Clifton, and the State of My Soul

 I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. (John 15:1-2)

When I'm walking through the forest by my house, I am forever fascinated by the trees. The tippy tops where the sunlight hits have green leaves reaching for the sky. But at the bottom of the trunks where I am walking, there's nothing but dead branches, so gray they almost look like ash. And they speak to my heart somehow.

They remind me of a summer morning at our old house in town about eight years ago. In a moment completely uncharacteristic of me, I decided to get out the ladder and trim a few dead branches I saw in one of our live oaks. Once up there, I noticed more and more dead branches. Then I glanced to another set of trees at the side of the yard and saw work to be done there, too, so I dragged the ladder to that spot and started snipping some more.

And more. And more. Small tips of deadness were revealed upon closer inspection to be entire lifeless limbs. I was stunned at the size of the branches and how easily I could break them off. Shift the ladder again and again. More and more and more deadness. I kept having to shield my head from the wood falling down on top of me.

In college, I read a poem by Lucille Clifton:

at last we killed the roaches.

mama and me. she sprayed,

i swept the ceiling and they fell

dying onto our shoulders, in our hair

covering us with red. the tribe was broken,

the cooking pots were ours again

and we were glad, such cleanliness was grace

when i was twelve. only for a few nights,

and then not much, my dreams were blood

my hands were blades and it was murder murder

all over the place

In my memory, those last couple lines were "death death / all over the place" . . . and those lines and that image were running through my head as I snapped leafless limbs from the tree branches above and around me and they came crashing down: "death .  . death . . . all over the place . . ."

And I wonder if that's how my Father the Gardener feels. He snips off one bit of deadness in my soul, only to reveal another. And another. Something that appears to me to be a small dry twig is in reality (as he already knows) a monumental limb, branching off into many directions, entwining itself with other branches, even with other trees, requiring not just a simple snap but a hacksaw at the trunk, leaving a gaping, painful hole for a while until healthy growth emerges to fill the space.

It shames me sometimes, this pruning. Death death, all over the place. But as Ms. Clifton tells me, such cleanliness is grace.