Shifting Frames Of Reference

My yoga practice is pretty rudimentary. A 25-minute program from Rodney Yee’s A.M. Yoga for Your Week is challenging enough for my inflexible body and long enough for my restless mind.

Still, I have come to appreciate the benefits of holding a pose for longer than my type-A personality would prefer. It usually is in those last moments when I tweak my position just so or breathe just so that I feel an opening, a release, or a shifting that I treasure as an ahhhh moment.

I was reminded of this shifting last Sunday, when our priest preached about the Parable of The Fig Tree from Luke 13: 6-10:

[Jesus] told this parable:
“A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

If  you’ve heard this Parable before, and especially if you learned about it in Sunday School or in a Bible study class, you probably understand that God is the owner of the vineyard, we are the fig tree, and Jesus is the gardener, pleading with God to give us a chance to “bear fruit.” Especially when we read this Parable during Lent, the tendency is to focus on the many ways in which we fail to bear fruit, and how we need to strive to earn our place in God’s garden.

But Jesus doesn’t explain this Parable, and our Priest challenged us to re-think the cast of characters.

• What if we are the owner, needing God’s help to see the good (or the hope) in a bad (or hopeless) situation?
• What if we are the gardener, working hard to turn this barren world into a place that looks more like God’s garden?
• What if God is the gardener, promising to do what He can to help us barren fig trees bear fruit?

Considering this Parable from these different frames of reference, I felt an opening in my understanding of God, and a deeper understanding of how often we limit Him with our own preconceptions. It was a real aha moment that I am still treasuring.

(If you want to read my priest’s sermon in her own words, you can read it on her blog here.)

Do you enjoy re-telling familiar stories from a different perspective?