The Official Fruit of Heaven

Enjoying the mass at San Juan Capistrano’s Mission Basilica, I have often wondered at the rich retablo that frames the sacred liturgy that enacts the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Just behind the solemn and life-imparting business of celebrating the Lord ’s Supper, the retablo portrays millennia-old church doctrines, doctrines that the early church fathers struggled to understand and articulate as they moved forward with Christ’s teaching and sought to protect the integrity of what God had revealed to humanity. Christ set the foundation, and ever since that time we who believe have been working out our faith in fear and trembling. On the retablo, the trinity breaks through the dome of the world into the affairs of humanity, and at the center the hypostatic Christ (fully God and fully human) is portrayed, bearing what Christians interpret as the greatest act of love ever to visit our world, an act so profound as to traverse, by way of a transcending, a profound and hopelessly irreparable wound in the soul of Creation. This transcending is believed by Christians not to be one of Nature as such, nor even over the limits of human insight (although he certainly did do just that), but a rising above human wickedness. The Christian claim is that Christ’s will remained at one with the Father’s will for the duration of his life, even as his death on the cross caused the Father to turn away. He could have thrown himself from the mountain or turned the stones into loaves of bread. He did not.

The retablo at the parish portrays other luminous theological mysteries, but the Spanish designers of our retablo chose something I find fascinating to frame these windows into other-worldly mysteries: Bunches of grapes on vine. Hundreds of them. All shimmering gold. These grapes would be just right for harvest— not too big for distracting you from your subject matter, nor too small to be unappealing. I want to pick them. I would eat them, were my teeth hard enough. The sort of Côte d'Or that would come from those vines, I can only fantasize about.

But why grapes next to images of sacred truths? Why the placement of something so simple and universal next to realities so divine? Because grapes are the official fruit of heaven. That’s my theory anyhow, and the following outlines why.

To begin with, of all Christ’s miracles, which one first led the disciples to believe he just might be who he said he was? If a restaurant runs out of wine for a wedding and the guests are thirsty, where does the host turn to for more vino? Picture the scene: A server brings the sommelier a ladle of red. The sommelier takes a whiff, examines the rim for color variation. A cork is nowhere to be seen, but the guests are thirsty, the occasion is once in a lifetime. The sommelier intrepidly takes a sip and a quirky smile grows out of the corner of his mouth. The server looks skeptical for some reason, but the sommelier is delighted. He turns to the bridegroom. “Usually the best wine is drunk first so the alcohol dulls the palate for the main wine’s alternate. You have reserved the best wine for the later hours,” he proclaims. “Serve the guests.” The server leans over to the sommelier and discreetly points out that the wine has come from the ceremonial wash jars. The server explains that he himself had filled the jars with Cana’s finest, good ol’ Galilee water. He’d followed that Jesus fellow’s instructions in a state of panic, and now the Chateau Du Margaux. John 2:11 reports that it is here his disciples began to believe in him.

When first approached by his mother with the request for wine, Jesus seems distracted. He tells her that his time has not yet come. He finally acquiesces, indicating that he is not impervious to the festivities, but his mind is elsewhere. Ecce homo— Behold, the man!— reverberates deep somewhere in his spirit. This joyful juice will have a new meaning, a meaning that will mark the incredible sacrifice that God’s plan for humanity’s redemption will require. The wine will become spilled blood, bread will become pierced flesh. Christians will enact this cannibalistic meal everywhere the Eucharist is celebrated, millions of times a day, 365 days a year, for thousands of years.

After the sorrow the wine and the bread promise a return to joy. The blood and flesh will once again unite in the person of Christ (as it has already in truth), and there will be another meal, a meal that lasts the term of forever. Christ invites each of us to the table, but many of the King’s guests are too busy to accept. Another round of invitations is sent. The deeper meaning of the blood and flesh is revealed: Fellowship between the human family and the Living God. The guests arrive. Bread is broken and a period of peace between Creator and created embarks unbroken. The wounds of Christ are scars on his blazing hands for eternity, but John’s vision of him on the Isle of Patmos reads, “His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters” (Revelation 1: 14-15).

Alas, we are on this side of time. For some of us, these Christian beliefs are nursemaids stories, “wide acres on the moon” to quote Freud’s The Future of an Illusion. For others who believe, myself included, all we can do is imagine what is must be like. Even John’s vision on Patmos is full of allegory and symbolism and anachronisms. What of the mix is literal and what is figurative? I can’t be too sure. But I am sure of grapes. I look at the retablo and I know— know from intimate experience— that grapes signify abundance. What I perceive when I see the Holy Trinity surrounded by the pregnant vine is a God of abundance, a God who comes with overwhelming completeness of being, completeness of righteousness, completeness of goodness. He gives himself in the sacramental wine, and we are made one with him in the Eucharistic meal.

I took the photograph above on one of the most meaningful days of my life. During the tail end of my time in Vienna, a friend of mine and I rented a car and drove down to Cinque Terre on the Italian Riviera. Coming from glamorous (insert not-so-veiled sarcasm here) Orange County, I had never seen an unlabeled jar of fresh pesto on a market shelf, authentic gaggles of beautifully-leathered elderly Italian folk on quant village porches, nor olive tree groves that once heard Latin being spoken during harvest time. Another thing I had never seen was, embarrassingly, a real vineyard. I had never seen gorgeous grapes pulling down on a vine before. Here I would drink the fresh wine of Corniglia and eat the fresh seafood of Riomaggiore. My friend and I walked the five villages in a day, and by the end of it I was saturated with the lavish wealth of a world not too far off the mark. If you had never left Cinque Terre, you might have had a hard time believing the old story about getting ejected from the garden.

I had a psychological shift that day. I never understood the grace that the sacraments entail until I saw a part of myself restored that day by my experience of overwhelming kindness in fellowship with the natural world around me. A subtle ability to trust Nature and God’s plan for His redemption of Nature came upon me like never before or since. Since I am inextricably part of Nature while I am living in this world, a part of myself was given back to me that day. God’s plan for my own redemption, enacted through his death on the cross and my acceptance of his sacrifice in the Eucharist, has come to me in a very real and tangible way. I am still struggling to adequately grasp many of the mysteries discovered by Christian theologians and the Church at large, but I understand grapes. When my Lord offers me a cup of wine and says “take and drink, this is my blood spilled for you,” I know that I am a man who is ill who is being offered a cup of medicine. I am a poor, estranged son who is being offered a cup from his Father’s finest cellar. I am a beggar who is welcomed as an esteemed guest by the most capable host. Thank God grapes are the official fruit of Heaven.