When the Vineyard Is Not Our Own

St. Gregory the Great and the terrible possibility of doing the work of God while neglecting God

“They made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept.”

— Song of Songs 1:6

There are words of the Fathers that console us.

There are others that leave us nowhere to hide.

St. Gregory the Great’s words about the priesthood belong to the latter kind.

“We accept the duties of office,” he says, “but by our actions we show that we are attentive to other things.”

It would be easy to read this as an indictment of bad priests, negligent bishops, distracted pastors, or a Church too occupied with administration, money, institutions, programs, meetings, and reputation.

That reading may even be true.

But it is spiritually useless if we stop there.

The Fathers never give us a sword so that we may stand outside ourselves and point it toward someone else. The word of God is given first to pierce the heart of the one who hears it.

And Gregory does something particularly devastating.

He includes himself.

“I accuse myself of the very same thing.”

That sentence may be more important than everything that follows.

He does not stand above the Church diagnosing its sickness. He stands beneath the judgment of God with everyone else.

That is the beginning of repentance.

The terrifying ease of becoming religiously busy

There is a form of infidelity that looks remarkably like fidelity.

We can spend our lives doing things for God while slowly ceasing to live before God.

We can preach.

Teach.

Write.

Organize.

Counsel.

Administer.

Build ministries.

Defend traditions.

Preserve institutions.

Attend meetings about the things of God.

And lose God.

Not doctrinally.

Interiorly.

The tragedy is not necessarily that we stop believing. It is that our attention becomes scattered among a thousand supposedly necessary things until almost nothing remains of the naked attention of the heart.

Gregory calls them “external affairs.”

The Desert Fathers called them distractions.

We call them responsibilities.

Sometimes they are responsibilities.

That is what makes the discernment so difficult.

Not everything that takes us away from prayer is frivolous. Some things genuinely must be done. Gregory himself knew this. He governed Rome during plague, famine, invasion, political instability, and social collapse. His complaint is therefore not the complaint of a man who had escaped responsibility.

It is the cry of a man who discovered that even necessary things can consume the heart.

And there comes a point when we must ask a question we have spent years avoiding:

What has all my work for God done to my capacity simply to be with God?

“My own vineyard I have not kept”

There is something almost unbearable in Gregory’s use of the Song of Songs:

“They made me keeper of the vineyards, but my own vineyard I have not kept.”

We may spend decades tending vineyards.

Parishes.

Communities.

Institutions.

Apostolates.

Books.

Students.

Penitents.

Programs.

Reputations.

Even souls.

And one day God allows us to see the vineyard we have neglected.

The heart.

The hidden place where no title follows us.

No audience applauds.

No one needs our expertise.

No one calls us Father.

No one asks what we have accomplished.

There remains only the person standing before God.

And perhaps this is why the desert has always frightened religious people.

The desert takes away the vineyards.

It takes away the crowd.

It takes away usefulness.

It takes away the reassuring evidence that our lives matter.

Eventually it may even take away the identity by which we believed ourselves to belong to God.

Then comes the question beneath every vocation:

Do you want God, or do you want a life in which you are important because of God?

There is no gentle way to ask it.

The desert is not interested in our résumé.

The silence of the shepherd

Gregory fears another thing: silence.

“The shepherd’s silence,” he says, harms the flock.

We should hear him.

There is cowardly silence.

There is the silence that refuses to speak because speaking would cost us something.

There is the silence that watches another person walk toward destruction and says nothing because we prefer peace to truth.

There is the silence of self-protection.

But there is another silence the Fathers knew very well.

The silence that comes when God has finished allowing us to speak from ourselves.

Abba Arsenius heard the words:

“Flee, be silent, pray always.”

This is not the opposite of Gregory.

It is the completion of Gregory.

Because the deepest problem is not merely whether the shepherd speaks.

It is whether his speech comes from silence.

A man can preach constantly and have nothing to say.

Another may speak very little, yet when he finally opens his mouth his words carry the weight of a life that has stood before God.

The Desert Fathers distrusted speech precisely because they revered the Word.

They knew how easily spiritual language becomes a substitute for spiritual life.

We can speak beautifully about surrender without surrendering.

We can teach prayer without praying.

We can describe humility while secretly requiring recognition.

We can preach detachment while clinging desperately to the identity of the preacher.

We can speak about the Cross while arranging our lives so that no real crucifixion reaches us.

Eventually God may have mercy on us.

He may take the words away.

When God dismantles the ministry

Perhaps some of the things we call failure are mercy.

The ministry contracts.

The audience becomes smaller.

The position disappears.

The institution no longer knows what to do with us.

The future we imagined closes.

Our strength diminishes.

Someone we love becomes dependent upon us.

The great vineyard is exchanged for one room, one person, one ordinary act of fidelity repeated until nobody notices.

And we think:

My life has become smaller.

Perhaps it has.

But smallness is not the same thing as meaninglessness.

The Fathers understood something we resist fiercely: salvation frequently arrives disguised as diminishment.

We want God to purify our ministry.

God may want to purify us of our need to have a ministry.

We ask Him to make us fruitful.

He may first make us barren.

We ask Him to use us.

He may ask whether we will still love Him when we are no longer useful.

That is a much more dangerous prayer.

The person before you

There is another way to neglect the vineyard.

We can become so concerned with the harvest that we cease seeing the person standing directly before us.

Christ never asked us to love humanity.

He commanded us to love our neighbor.

The neighbor is inconveniently particular.

The elderly parent who asks the same question again.

The sick person whose needs interrupt our plans.

The friend who cannot be repaired.

The person whose suffering offers us no opportunity for accomplishment.

The one whose care will never become impressive enough to place on a résumé.

This may be the vineyard God actually gave us.

And we may spend years asking Him for another one.

There are moments when changing a bed, preparing a meal, sitting beside someone who is frightened, answering the same question patiently for the tenth time, or simply remaining when we would rather escape may contain more of the Gospel than many things publicly called ministry.

Because love has become concrete.

There is nowhere to hide inside abstraction.

The priest beneath the priesthood

Gregory’s words finally expose something deeper than clerical negligence.

They expose the danger of confusing office with identity.

“We retain the honourable office but fail to practise the virtues proper to it.”

The Fathers would recognize the danger immediately.

The habit cannot save the monk.

The monastery cannot make the heart solitary.

Ordination cannot make a man holy.

Orthodoxy of doctrine cannot substitute for purity of heart.

Nor can the loss of any of these things separate a person from God.

There comes a time when every external identity must descend into the heart or die.

Priest.

Monk.

Teacher.

Writer.

Spiritual father.

Theologian.

Founder.

All of them must eventually bow before something infinitely simpler:

a creature before his Creator.

God is.

I am before Him.

Perhaps much of the spiritual life consists in allowing everything between those two sentences to fall away.

The final vineyard

Gregory feared reaching judgment having tended everyone’s vineyard except his own.

We should fear the same thing.

Not neurotically.

Truthfully.

One day there will be no institution left to preserve.

No ministry to manage.

No reputation to defend.

No theological position to explain.

No future to arrange.

There will be only Christ.

And us.

The great question will not be how indispensable we were to the Church.

It will not be how many people listened to us.

It will not be whether our plans succeeded.

It will not even be whether others understood the path by which God led us.

The question will be terribly simple:

Did you become capable of love?

Did suffering soften you or make you hard?

Did humiliation make you truthful?

Did loss teach you to release what was never yours?

Did you learn to see Christ in the person entrusted to you?

Did prayer descend from your lips into your heart?

Did you finally allow yourself to become small?

The harvest is indeed great.

But perhaps before asking where God needs us to labor, we should sometimes dare to ask whether the vineyard He has given us is already beneath our feet.

It may be much smaller than the vineyard we imagined.

It may consist of one house.

One room.

One suffering person.

One hidden obedience.

One Name repeated quietly in the night.

And perhaps, when almost everything else has been taken away, we discover that this was never the interruption of the ministry.

It was the ministry.

And beneath even that discovery lies something simpler still.

God never needed us to save His vineyard.

He asked us to become His.