The poplar extends long, thin fingers. The oak stretches out sturdy wood, and the apple tree has knotty extensions of itself.

It's as though the tree begets its own shape again and again as it grows.

Do you think this could be a parable for our dear old Mother Church?

Are we formed in her image?

And did this image grow from the tree that held Christ Jesus??

I look at a crucifix and see the sacred beginning growing from pain and bare wood.

But Winter can also offer us other parables if we take them into prayer.

In John 15, Jesus calls himself the True Vine, while we are the branches.

I like to reflect on this.

Do we see ourselves as branches of the true vine?

If so, how is the true vine shaping us?

This is a powerful parable.

I go back to Matthew 23, where it is said:

"Jesus spoke all things in parables, and without a parable was not anything he said."

The statement is made twice, first as a positive, then as a double negative making a positive.

It is a structure used to deliver something that is very important.

The writer was saying, "Take notice of these words!"

In the Gospels. I find only two examples of this form of writing.

It's at the beginning of John where it is said of Jesus: "Through Him, all things were made, and without Him was not anything that was made."

The other, in Matthew, stresses the importance of Jesus' parables.

This brings me back to Winter, to bare trees, bare vineyards and Jesus saying, "I am the True Vine, and you are the branches."

In winter conditions, how do I, as a branch, reflect the quality of the vine?

Do I know myself as a branch that is an extension of the vine? Or do I imagine I am a growth separate from it?

If pruning comes and I am cut back, do I resent it? Or do I see it as an opportunity for greater growth?

These are hard questions, and they usually come when we are having a spiritual Winter.

But if we look around at God's creation, we see another parable, and we know the truth that Jesus knew.

Winter is not the season of dormancy and death.

It is preparation for the season of greatest growth.

In the gift of Faith, crucifixion belongs to resurrection, just as Winter is the prelude to Spring.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator. Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

The failure rate is too high.

The only resolution I kept, was giving up smoking in 1976, and that was more about health than the dare.

These days, I'm aware that our measurements of time are our way of managing incarnation on earth. We place a grid over eternity.

If we lived on a much bigger planet that had four days of light, four days of darkness, and different seasons, we would change our time grid to suit.

What is still interesting about our tradition of making promises at the beginning of our year, is our motive for doing it.

Why do we feel this urge to better ourselves?

The growth imperative is all around us. We live in an expanding universe. All living things strive to grow, then die and decay to become new life.

There is no evidence to suggest that plants and animals question who they are. For them, growth seems all about nutrition, reproduction and the protection of territory.

We too have those instincts but there is something else, a restlessness that lies in a desire for inner growth.

Animals don't need religion.

So what makes us so different?

I call this ‘The Breath of God", going back to the story of Adam, and Gd breathing life into clay.

One of the Desert Fathers had another description. He said, "Wr are part animal and part angel."

I can relate to that too, and I look back at all the times I saw angel self and animal self as separate.

Sometimes, they were at war.

How many of my New Year resolutions were attempts to shut my animal self in a cupboard?

It began in childhood: I will not steal biscuits. I will not swear. I will be kind to my sisters. I will not tell lies.

Now I l know that the two belong together.

The breath of God - or angel self - wants to be human.

Through incarnation, it can grow.

The animal self needs the angel self to bring illumination to its darkness.

They do come together but union it takes time filled with life experience.

The words we put to this process of spiritual growth, are ours, and the metaphors vary. We cannot say what God is but we can say what God is like.

For me, a beautiful symbol of the angel/animal connection is the Light of the Wold born in an animal shelter.

If spiritual growth is our imperative, what is wrong with the New Year resolution?

It is only once a year. And it is usually guilt-based.

Growth is continuous and begins with self-acceptance. We are who we are meant to be, perhaps not so much human beings, as human becomings.

Our faith means that every day our angel and animal are gently embracing and working together.

God's breath is in my clay, and the clay of everyone I meet.

Let us live in gratitude.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

While I waffled on about the spiritual experience, he smiled kindly and said. "I'm a bread and butter man, myself."

He showed by example that contents need a container, that spirituality thrives on discipline, and the sacraments were shovels that dug a deep well and kept it clear of rubbish.

Only once did I disagree with him.

In one of his homilies, he said. "Why does God allow sin in the world? It is a mystery. We don't know."

For me, the answer was obvious. No sin. No growth.

Is it as simple as that?

I reflect on how we grow. The spark of God within us creates a yearning for unity with God, but also there is a shadow that we call "original sin."

For me, this has nothing to do with the Adam and Eve parable. It is about being part of the animal kingdom and having that primal instinct for survival.

All our sins of selfishness are shared by the animal kingdom.

In the early church, the Desert Father who said we are a part angel and part animal had it right as far as I'm concerned.

My memory spans 80 years of walking with Jesus on The Way of spiritual growth. The blessings f Light were there, and also the dark weight of the shadow.

It was the tension between light and dark that was my teacher.

I learned that there were sins bigger than the seven deadly sins which were all concerned with personal integrity.

In effect, my biggest sin was Ignorance - judging people I did not know and situations I had never been in. That brought me to the second biggest sin, Self-righteousness, and the third, Unkindness.

All of these separated me from others and made me a prisoner to the loneliness of the ego.

The journey out of that prison took years and is ongoing. That is so for most of us. But there comes a time when we see the shadow as light unborn, and we value it's teaching.

So often that teaching was regret. Regret is a gift that can give birth to new light.

This growth process brings a personal understanding of Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds, how they had to grow together until harvest time.

The same lesson is in the Garden of Eden story. The knowledge of good and the knowledge of evil are in one fruit. They belong together. And when they are fully digested, they bring wisdom.

Parables with similar meaning exist in other religions.

In India, there is the parable of the lotus.

The lotus plant has a beautiful fragrant flower. It blooms in the light because its roots are in the dark mud.

Remove the roots from the mud and the plant will die.

When I was a small child, I was told that someone called Satan made me sin, and someone called Jesus died to fix that.

Where was my responsibility?

So yes, it has been a long journey. I have enjoyed the green pastures and still waters, but am most grateful for the rocks, the mud, the steep mountains and dark valleys. I know what a poet meant when he wrote: "O God, give me desolation! "

For God is in everything - and especially the hard places.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Growth through the tension of opposite states, is a condition of nature.

Let us think about that for a moment.

At this time of the year, we see trees bursting into leaf.

The smooth branch ruptures to produce buds that become leaves and blossom.

In this, the tree is also increasing in size. But it can't grow without this breaking, bursting, rupturing.

Likewise, we see a tender plant like a buttercup or a toadstool that has pushed its way through concrete or an asphalt pavement in response to the urge to grow.

Spiritually, we do the same. We grow towards the light of God, and while that growth is glorious, it is not without struggle. In spiritual terms, our struggle is in the context our hunger for God.

St Paul knew this struggle well. In Corinthians 2, chapter 12, he talks about his weakness and how he prayed to be rid of it. But the Lord said, "My grace is enough for you; my power is at its best in weakness."

When St Paul realised that the poverty of his weakness was actually the open doorway to God's grace, he came to this conclusion. "When I am weak, then I am strong."

That was his hymn to imperfection.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it another way. When a journalist asked her why she chose to work with the destitute and dying, she her answer shocked him. She said, "I do it to combat the Hitler in me."

When we look around us, we realise that nothing in nature is perfect. Nothing is complete or without flaw. Everything is in a state of becoming, or in a state of decaying to become something else.

Yet in human consciousness there is something that constantly aspires to perfection. It's like a little compass needle in us, always pointing to true North. So where did this knowledge of perfection come from?

At one time, it was thought that it related back to a blissful time in the womb. Now we know that our time in the womb is far from perfect. It has moments of tension, stress, trauma.

So why do we have this kind of spiritual instinct for perfection? I like to think that it comes from our pre-conception state. I call it the God gene.

One of the Church Fathers describes it as the kiss of God given to our souls before we are set on our human journey.

But paradoxically, the way to the perfection of God's embrace, is through a celebration of the human journey, all of it, and being fully human means entering the struggle and making friends with our shadow, that part of ourselves that we would rather reject.

It is the shadow that is our growing space.

As we get older, faith tends to get simpler and if you were to ask me what I believe, I'd probably say something like this: We come from God and we return to God and our little time here in Life School is for the growth of the soul.

We are given every teacher and lesson we need and if we fail a text or exam, that's okay, it will be given to us again, and again, until we learn from it and move on.

Life school is not easy, but it is made glorious because Jesus walks it with us.

They're about contradictions.

We recognize this as paradox; but we don't always see the tension between opposing states as being necessary for our spiritual development.

I guess I'm trying to say that in God's unfailing love, our darkness will serve the light.

It's all about the growth of the soul.

People who describe soul growth as a spiral are probably right. It seems to me that we go through the journey again and again but each time at a different level.

These days there is much talk about "awareness" and "mindfulness," while Jesus talked about being ‘awake'.

I like that last description. It describes a stirring from sleep - the first step of the growth process.

Awakening happens when experience takes us to knowledge of a greater reality.

I recognize I go through five stages in the process.

Awakening

The first Awakening stage is designed to take me to a larger place.

Usually, it comes as some kind of seismic shift in life. It can be big or small, wanted or unwanted, pleasant or harsh, but always, beyond the immediate effect, there is a sensation of some kind of newness.

Something profound is happening. I'm being called to a larger place.

Resistance

Because this awakening takes me beyond my small comfort zone, there will come the second stage which is Resistance. This is my me-first instinct telling me to be safe and not take risks. I guess that's the job of the ego which is directly plugged into survival. It's supposed to protect me, so it tries to pull me back to my old state.

When I take these movements into prayer with Jesus, the resistance will have a heavy dull feeling while the awakening experience will feel positive.

Acceptance and Affirmation

So eventually I come to the third stage, which is Acceptance. Once I have moved to acceptance, I'll get Affirmation. Affirmation usually comes several times and in ways that can astonish me. It seems that Jesus is sending me loving messages to support a new stage of growth.

Freedom

That heralds the fifth stage of Freedom and the kind of peace that Jesus talked about. It really does pass all previous understanding of what peace is.

So ends the journey I call a soul story. But it's not a full stop kind of ending, just a comma or semi-colon finish, because another soul story will begin.

I'll have to go through these five stages again but at a different level.

On paper it all sounds simple, but I find stage two resistance, can get emotionally messy because it involves sacrifice and that me-first voice of ego doesn't do sacrifice.

A lot of time needs to go into prayer.

Prayer is made easy in the company of Jesus who made the journey before us, and is with us all the way.

Growth is indeed about paradox.

And the way of contradiction is the way of the Cross.

It brings strength out of weakness, fullness out of emptiness, light out of darkness, love out of hate, life out of death.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Atlanta diocese has seen its number of registered parishioners grow from nearly 322,000 in 2002 to one million in 2012. Charleston has expanded by 50 per cent in the last decade, while Charlotte and Little Rock have grown by a third.

"Instead of us closing parishes and closing schools, we're doing the opposite. We're in total growth mode," Deacon Sean Smith, chancellor for the diocese of Knoxville, to the National Catholic Register.

When Knoxville was established in 1988 it had 37 parishes. It has since added 14, the number of parishioners has doubled, and it expects to have 23 men in graduate seminary next year.

Deacon Smith said Catholics in the South, where they are a decided minority, must constantly defend their faith and, as a result, come to cherish it.

In a region where churches sit on seemingly every street corner and billboards belt out Bible verses and calls for repentance, local Catholics say they have found fertile ground for the renewal of the Church.

"Our Protestant brothers and sisters have done us a great favour. Talking about faith here in the South is like eating, breathing, and sleeping," said Randy Hain, co-founder of The Integrated Catholic Life, an online magazine.

"There's an openness about faith here which makes it easier to be open about your faith if you're Catholic."

Lisa Wheeler, founder of a Catholic marketing firm in the Atlanta area, said dialogue with Protestants has produced a steady stream of Catholic converts, who bring enthusiasm and passion for their faith.

Hain said that if Catholics in other areas were as open about their faith as Southerners are, there would be a resurgence in the Church.

"Let's worry less about offending others," he said. "Let's worry more about practising our faith."

Source:

National Catholic Register

Image: Diocese of Charlotte

"We want to put the Holy Spirit to sleep," the Pontiff said. "We want to ‘tame' the Holy Spirit. And that doesn't work, because he is God. He is the wind that comes and goes and we know not from where.

"He is the power of God, what gives us consolation and strength to move forward. But move forward!"

The Pope said Catholics are often reluctant to "move forward" because they want to remain "comfortable". He used the aftermath of Vatican II as an example of reluctance to move with the Holy Spirit.

"The Council was a beautiful work of the Holy Spirit," he said. "Think of Pope John: he seemed a good pastor, and he was obedient to the Holy Spirit, and he did that.

"But after 50 years, have we done everything that the Holy Spirit said to us in the Council? In the continuity of the growth of the Church which was the Council?

"No, we celebrate this anniversary, we make a monument, but that does not bother us. We do not want to change.

"What is more: there are voices that want to go back. This is called being stubborn, this is called wanting to tame the Holy Spirit, this is called becoming fools and slow of heart."

"Even in our personal lives," the Pope added, "the Spirit prompts us to take a more evangelical path."

"Do not resist the Holy Spirit," he continued. "It is the Spirit that makes us free, with that freedom of Jesus, with the freedom of the children of God!"

Pope Francis concluded, "Do not resist the Holy Spirit: this is the grace that I wish all of us asked the Lord: the docility to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that comes to us and makes us go forward in the way of holiness, the holiness of Church which is so beautiful. The grace of docility to the Holy Spirit. So be it."

Sources:

Catholic News Agency

Catholic News Service

Image: Taylor Marshall