There is a rose bush in my front yard that has gone wild. It’s an eyesore. It only produces a handful of blossoms every summer, and they are drab and diseased. I keep cutting it back, it keeps growing like a weed with prickly stems that awkwardly reach into the healthy rose bushes on either side of it. Every fall as I cut it back, I think to myself that I need to just dig it out. But a friend of mine, who has a greener thumb, has convinced me to take advantage of its mature root structure and try grafting another healthier rose onto it.
Grafting is a miraculous science. A plant is trained and convinced to become something different. It takes time and coaxing, and looks painful. The gardener has to expose the rootstock of a plant and tightly secure another plant, just as raw and exposed, to it. Then you watch and wait, occasionally checking to make sure the two are taking to each other.
Bishop Barron used this image to describe conversion on the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. He said, “To be a Christian is to be grafted on to Christ and hence drawn into the very dynamics of the inner life of God. We don’t speak simply of following or imitating Jesus. We speak of becoming a member of his Mystical Body.” This process of becoming a member, of being grafted into Christ, is a provocative image; to be exposed and re-rooted is exactly what conversion feels like.
One of the mistakes I made early on in my conversion was misunderstanding this concept: baptism was the beginning, not the end. And the grafting of my soul to Christ and His Church was not going to be a lovely, whimsical process, but a gritty and sometimes painful one. I wasn’t an infant, I was an adult—my old roots had to re-graph onto the true vine. That would take time, in fact the process will be on-going until my death.
My first year of being Catholic was the hardest year of my life. I had been infused with grace through Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist, then walked right back into a darkness. I thought I would be invincible with all that grace. But I was ill-equipped, truly a soul-infant. I look back now and wonder how I could have managed those years differently—perhaps I should have had a steady confessor, a spiritual director, more of a church community. But God is good, and though I felt abandoned at times, He was there.
I have noticed over the years that whenever there is a period of growth—which are uncomfortable and difficult—a period of rest usually follows. In those moments of rest, sometimes I can see the new bloom taking shape. Sometimes I don’t; sometimes I think, Well, I guess this side of Heaven I won’t know what that was all about. The whole surrender and trust thing is really hard. But I do know I need the rootstock, I need Christ’s life flowing through me.