Essay #11:  Practicing the Presence I:
The Soul’s Journey in Time and
The Kabbalistic Trigram

In John 2, we read that Jesus is invited to a wedding at Cana in Galilee.  It is no accident that this is the first place Jesus goes once he has been baptized and gathered his disciples together.  Having, in a sense, betrothed himself to his disciples–and to all who would follow him–this wedding represents his union and covenant with them from an esoteric perspective.  Insofar as Jesus is God’s perfect representative on Earth, it represents God’s union and covenant with us as well.  Moreover, the specifics of the event convey in detail what it takes for us in return to become disciples of Jesus and the Father.  That is, they provide an esoteric illustration of our spiritual Way of Return. They reveal in great detail how we can begin to bring God’s Kingdom into this world.  The wedding at Cana thus serves as the foundation for a further exploration of the spiritual practices that Jesus taught to guide us home.  In fact, much of the Christology discussed in the previous 4 chapters has been drawn from it.  The wedding at Cana offers a spiritual landscape of so many layers and so much depth that we literally could not have approached it without all our previous efforts to elucidate the key concepts of the Christology.  At Cana we come to a threshold where we both look back at the concepts we have already elucidated and look forward to more detailed transformational practices of the Way of Return.

At Cana, Jesus presents us with a methodology for practicing the presence of God that telescopically expands the Kabbalistic Trigram into a matrix of application that ultimately becomes the Quadrants of the Cross.  From here on, practicing the presence of God jumps off the page and opens before us into a way and a life.

Like Jesus, we, too, have been invited to attend a wedding feast.  This feast represents our opportunity to join Jesus in living life from the Father.  We can attend like guests having only a dim relation to the bride and groom.  These guests are the first to leave.  We can attend like guests enthralled with the celebration and intent on full participation in the observances and festivities. Or again, we can attend as the bride or groom themselves, fully ready for betrothal to the Father, fully ready to take up the yoke of the spiritual life.  The wedding feast esoterically represents the whole range of choices we can make in the midst of Immanuel, “God-with-us,” represented by Jesus.  And Jesus plays the role not only of a guest fully enthralled with the celebration, but in his case an expression of the Divine power itself which transforms the wedding feast into a betrothal to the Father himself.  As we delve with Jesus into the depths of the celebration, we meet that very invitation to step into the shoes of the bride or groom.  Typical of the way Jesus manifests divine power, we find that this invitation to follow him into the Holy of Holies is couched not in compulsion or fear but in a setting replete with gaiety, joy, and celebration.  Nonetheless, his participation is described in terms which carry the deepest and most profound esoteric meanings.

The story begins with Jesus’s mother telling him there is something wrong.  She says that the wine at the feast has run out and implies that he should do something about it. That is, she implies that he should go get more wine.  Esoterically, this echoes John 1:9-14.  It is a depiction of the existential malaise alluded to there, which we have been exploring in the previous chapters.  Our problem is that we have run out of wine.  That is, we are no longer able to discern and to savor God’s substance–God’s light–in ourselves as he intended.  Here is yet another description of the very malady that Jesus was sent to help us heal.  On this deeper level, we can discern Divine Mother speaking to Jesus through his earthly mother, showing him and telling him what has gone wrong, and what he needs to do.  He responds to his mother rather cryptically, and it is only at the deeper level that we can tell what he is really talking about.

Jesus says:  “Woman, my hour is not yet.”  What can he mean by this?  Only after we read the whole story of the wedding at Cana and of Jesus’s life can we come back to this and know.  He means it is not time yet for him to return to God, the Source.  Later he will tell his disciples that they will drink his blood for wine.  In retrospect, the clay jars at the wedding feast symbolize his body, and ours.  There will come a time when the clay jar of his body will be broken and his blood and the wine of renewal will flow freely everywhere, but the hour is not yet.  Thus, Jesus’s response foreshadows both the healing to come and the sacrifice that he will have to make for it.  Against this sobering trajectory, he then unfolds his lesson in answer to our existential malaise.  That is, he shows how to become drunk on the wine of the Creator once again.

Jesus turns to the empty clay jars typically used by the Jews for ritual washing and purification before a meal.  Significantly, the jars are empty.  On one level we may conclude that the process of purification stands incomplete:  these jars have not been used.  What Jesus is about to do, then, may be viewed as a substitute for the old ritual and a path to purification in its own right. This leads us, once more, to see the jars themselves as symbols for our bodies, which were to have been washed. And once we take that view, a still deeper level of interpretation opens for us.

Viewing the jars as vessels for the infilling of God’s light and life, the emptiness of the jars corresponds esoterically with God’s formless self.  (Buddhists call it shunyata; Kabbalah calls it ayin.)  Before God created us, there was only his formless self.  Only through him did the empty shells of our bodies become alive (compare John 1:3).  Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars with water, symbolizing our creation.  Out of the emptiness of God’s formless self came life represented by the filling with water.  Moreover, by God’s own power, this life was fully suffused with his presence.  That is, God filled his creation with the Holy Spirit, symbolized here by the turning of water into wine.  What Jesus is about to do through the Father’s own power presents a perfect parallel to what we read in John 1 in the previous chapter, where God’s logos was described as “the light illuminating every man who came into the world.”  God’s light filled our bodies.  The wine of his Spirit filled our souls.  In our original created state we were completely suffused with his presence.  But something happened.

We read in John 2:8-10 that the servants take the water that Jesus turned into wine to the master of the wedding feast.  Evidently it is very good wine.  Once he tastes it, the master remarks to the bridegroom that the best wine is normally served first, while the guests are sober enough to enjoy it.  Then, after everyone is well-wined and unable to distinguish it, the cheap wine is usually brought out.  However, he exclaims, “You have saved the best until now!”  Here the best wine is coming after the less good wine.

Once again, in esoteric interpretation the wedding party represents the progression of human life as a whole following Creation.  As time went on, we got drunk and began to forget who we were, who made us, and where we had come from.  We fell prey to the seduction of our own minds and egos, as we explored in previous chapters.  Therefore, God out of his grace sent Jesus Christ to remind us and bring us out of our stupor.  In other words, he sent him to bring us back to the truth, or to bring our origin and nature “out of hiddenness” for us again.  It is hugely ironic that God sought to bring us out of our stupor by empowering Jesus to make us more wine, but the irony of the drunken sage has long been found in Middle Eastern poetry and teachings.

At the start of our marriage to God we drank the best wine.  That was the Spirit of God, God’s presence when we were close to him at the time of our creation, or as babes soon after we came into this world.  As the wedding celebration of our life went on, we continued to drink wine, but we progressively got drunker and drunker.  We started drinking the cheap wine.  We got drunk on our own power, our own effort, or drunk on our own brokenness, our failings.  Then God send Jesus Christ to make us new wine, and it was once again the best.  It was in fact, the same wine that we drank at the time of our creation.

God sent Jesus Christ to remind us who we are, who made us, and where we came from—to give us the best wine to drink again.  God sent help to his people.  Yet John 2 is not meant merely to record an historical event.  Through its symbolism, it teaches us to remember that we are at a wedding party with God our whole life long.  When we think the best is exhausted we can discover again that God’s supply of it is endless.  We are like the wedding master emerging from the nightmare that there isn’t enough to see everyone through the celebration.  Yet God, in his mercy, remembers us and resupplies us out of his fullness, again, and again, and again.  (Jesus taught us to pray to the Father to “give us this day our daily bread.”  He could have easily taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread and wine.”  For these both symbolize our daily portion drawn from him, which is more lifegiving and sustaining than anything we can draw from our own egos or indulgences.)

In Jesus, God’s logos incarnate, we come to God’s creative principle embodied and dwelling among us to enlighten us.  Jesus converts whole jars of water to wine.  Out of his fullness we dip ladle after ladle, glass after glass, grace after grace (echoes of John 1:16).  Our souls become more and more filled with the same divine presence which fills Jesus.  As we look still more deeply into the wedding story, it becomes clearer and clearer just how this happens.

In John 2:4, Jesus addresses his mother as “woman,” which seems strange.  In the same sentence, as we have noted, he tells her his hour is not yet.  By addressing her as “woman” Jesus is making it clear that he is not speaking to her only as his mother, but as an exemplar of all humankind.  He is implying that the time has not yet come for him to utterly transform the wedding feast for humankind by demonstrating that God’s wine or presence will flow far and wide from him even in the breaking of his bodily vessel or death.  He is referring to the lesson he will teach later that the soul, which conveys God’s presence, outlives the body and even has the power to return again and raise the body up around it.  To practice dwelling in God’s presence while incarnate, we cannot ignore that his presence will ultimately transcend our physical bodies.  Otherwise, the body itself can become a hindrance to practicing the presence.  When Jesus responds, “My hour is not yet,” he is surely referring to the historical time of his death.  By extension, however, he is also referring to the time in our own spiritual evolution when we learn the lesson ultimately taught by his death and resurrection.  Practicing the presence cannot be fully taught or accomplished except against the background of the final return, even if “not yet,” so Jesus invokes this at the outset of his response.  Though a large lesson, we may derive from his example that practicing God’s presence does not depend on our having a body but actually supercedes and transcends it.

Other details of the story corroborate this.  The clay jars Jesus uses are intact and not yet broken.  But they are obviously fragile, just like our bodies.  We are told in detail what was inside them at each stage and what Jesus did with it.  First, as we have noted, was emptiness.  That was God’s self before he poured life into our bodies.  His emptiness is everywhere and nowhere.  It is not just inside the jars.  It is outside of them as well and even within all things.  Atoms themselves, as we know, consist mostly of emptiness.  Moreover, there isn’t any clear line of separation between the emptiness inside the jars and the emptiness outside them.  God’s self is universal and cannot really be localized.

Once water is poured into the jars, it becomes much clearer where things begin and end.  Water, for the time being, takes on the well-defined form of the jars.  The water symbolizes our life as contained in the body.  Like our bodies, the clay jars retain their shape for a time and during that time afford the water some measure of form and isolation just as our bodies give shape to the life force within us and isolate us from other life forces.  Eventually, the fragile jars collapse and release the water inside.  Interestingly, the jars are jars only for the time that they retain their particularly fragile forms.  Once smashed they are no longer jars.  Likewise, bodies are no longer bodies once they have died and decomposed.  But water remains water wherever it is, whether it is contained in a jar or not contained.  Similarly, the life that God gave us is not dependent on the outward shell that contains it.  Therefore, practicing his presence simply cannot be limited by that shell either.  The water that is made into wine does not need to abide in jars to remain wine.  Immediately Jesus tells the servants to “draw some out and take it to the master,” as if to show at this esoteric level that the divinely inspired life transcends our earthly shells.  We should have confidence that we will be able to continue to dwell with God once we have left these bodies.  But perhaps this is too much of a lesson for us to learn all at once.

Mercifully, Jesus also chooses to address us precisely in our state of “being contained.”  He deigns to deliver the smaller–we might say “introductory”–lessons he hopes to teach us as incarnate beings.  In other words, he is willing to meet us where we live, in human form, with our very personal and individual struggles, and to teach us how to transform our lives so that they become more and more filled with the divine presence.  Even in our limited incarnate state, under Jesus’s influence, the water in us–our life–can become transformed into wine.  That is, it can become filled with and indistinguishable from the divine presence.

The wedding jars should have been filled with water from the start.  They usually were.  In fact, as the wedding master remarks, they were typically filled with good wine at the start.  What usually followed was a degrading awareness on the part of the guests as to what they were drinking.  In the same way, we have never actually been devoid of God’s presence.  However, we have forgotten that presence. The illustration has perhaps more to do, then, with our awareness–or lack of awareness–of our nature than with our actual nature.  This perfectly parallels John 1:9-11, where we are told that God’s light does indeed enlighten every person coming into the world.  However, not every person remains awake enough to acknowledge and receive this light into their awareness. Some who do are called “buddhas,” which means awakened, and Christ himself was one of these.

In this regard, we may compare our current story with the story of another wedding feast told in Matthew 25.  In that story, those awaiting the bridegroom were all depicted as sleeping.  And when he came after them in the middle of the night, some had sufficient oil in their lamps to follow him, and some did not.  Akin to those, we are all in some sense asleep, that is, in a state of forgetfulness in comparison to an enlightened master like Jesus.  For some of us God’s light makes its way into our awareness and stays bright.  For others who are not ready, those of us must go off like the ones in the story “to those who sell, and buy for themselves.”  In other words, those have yet to purchase with the coins of life experience and spiritual practice enough oil or substance for awareness to “catch fire”.  Elsewhere, Jesus describes the challenges of members of this group in detail.  In the parable of the sower, he shows how some of them have so little substance that awareness of God’s presence has “nowhere to take root.”  Others have some substance, but only shallow, so that his presence cannot endure afflictions.  Still others may have substance, but they also use it to feed the lusts and cares of this world–bodily obsessions and the pursuit of riches–so that their attention drifts and their awareness of God’s presence sputters.  He contrasts all of these with those whose substance is deep and clear of distractions.  These are the ones who are ready and able to follow the bridegroom when he comes; yea, it is these who are ready to enter into the Kingdom of God.

Far from being a judgement upon all members of the former group, Jesus’s parable reads more like the sketch of a spiritual practice or set of practices meant to address us wherever we may be “on the scale of awareness.” We can begin to trace a progression which leads to greater and greater depths of awareness, and greater and greater realization of the Kingdom.  Jesus invites persons at all different levels of awareness to follow him back to the Father.  He sends his wine out to be distributed to all the wedding guests, without distinction.  Moreover, at the same feast, he sketches for us the specific steps in the process leading to increased awareness, or we could say, following the persistent irony,  “God-intoxication.”  We are full of wine but to one extent or another we have forgotten we are wine and tend to see ourselves only as water.  This forgetting, then, is the common feature found in all who are not fully awake.  Therefore, the common cure will have to begin with remembering.

We are told in John 2:9 that the master of the banquet “tasted the water that had been turned into wine.”  This is a curious and specific phrase.  It unites for us into one taste what became separated when we forgot our true origin.  By the Father’s power and grace, as manifested through Jesus, water and wine become indistinguishable for us once more, that is, life and Spirit come together again.  It is noteworthy that this all happens through the tasting, and not through understanding where it has come from.  We are specifically told that the wedding master did not know where what he drank had come from.  Nevertheless, he was fully able to pronounce it “good wine.”  We are brought back to remembering in the tasting.  In both the Old and New Testaments, we find tasting and drinking used as metaphors for passage into different states of consciousness.  In John 4, Jesus requests a drink from a Samaritan woman and offers in return a drink of “eternal life.”  And in Genesis 1:7, we are told that “the eyes of both of them were opened” once Adam and Eve had both tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Tasting is not without its risks.  But what we learn perhaps above all else from Jesus at the wedding at Cana is that spiritual practice cannot exist in its absence.  Practice can exist in the absence of full understanding, but not in the absence of the direct experience of the divine.  Some tastes lead us astray, it is true, and there is no better-known example than what the taste of the apple did to Adam and Eve.  In our own lives, we struggle with an incredible variety of tastes many of which may be characterized as seductions and addictions–what Jesus referred to in the Parable of the Sower as a thicket of thorns and brambles.  Ultimately, however, there is one taste which trumps all the others.  There is one against which they all pale as “cheap wine,” and that is the taste of the Holy Spirit, the rich wine of our origin as returned to us here through Jesus Christ.

As the banquet master remarks, this late in the feast we are already used to drinking cheap wine.  However, it does not have to be so.  Jesus knew he was delivering good wine to guests who were likely already to be drunk on cheap wine.  Even so, he must have trusted in their ability to discern the good, just as he trusted in the ability of even the worst sinners to discern the better path.  This is not to imply that absolute or total enlightenment comes in any one gulp any more than salvation emerges from one righteous act.  It is rather to proclaim that within every person, no matter how deeply buried it may be, lies the faculty to taste and discern the Spirit of God and the ability to begin to use that faculty to realize the Kingdom of Heaven.  As Jesus himself said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field…but when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds come and perch in its branches” (Matthew 13:31-32).  Each person takes his or her own seed and plants it in their own field.  There is nothing here about planting seeds of faith in someone else’s field, and still less about coming to settle in their branches like adoring birds.  Rather, here as elsewhere, Jesus shows a profound confidence and trust in every individual’s ability to find God in themselves. 

The role of the servants in our story offers an important further teaching about just this ability.  It is a detail that could easily be overlooked, and as is typical of the way esoteric writing conceals the most in the least, contains some of the most import details of Jesus’s entire lesson.  In fact, the details of Jesus’s anatomy of increased awareness of God are revealed in the roles the servants play.  This anatomy serves as the backbone for the specific spiritual practices of the Return to be revealed later.

Jesus’s mother, the mother of God, tells the servants to do exactly as he asks.  This is highly symbolic.  The Divine Mother is instilling in them obedience to her logos, her plan of creation and return.  “Do as the incarnate presence of God tells you,” she implies.  This command comes from the highest possible source.  But who are these servants?  Why is this seemingly trivial detail put forward in the story?  It could have been written innocuously in the passive voice instead like this:  “Some of this water that was made into wine was given to the wedding master, who declared it to be good wine.”  The servants need not have been mentioned at all, except for their essential esoteric significance.

On a deeper level, the servants exemplify at least three things.  First, they are told what to do.  They dutifully surrender to the one who commands them.  Thus, they exemplify the quality or practice of surrender.  Second, even though they surrender, it is only through their effort that the water that is wine gets to the wedding master at all.  Thus, they also exemplify effort.  Finally, it is not just anything whatever that they do.  Both their obedience (surrender) and their efforts are in the service of a specific intention:  to take the wine to the wedding master.  Thus they also exemplify intentionality.  Furthermore, in the guise of the servants, the three qualities of surrender, effort, and intentionality are in perfect alignment with the Divine Source, as represented by Jesus.   Here we meet again the Kabbalistic Trigram explained in Book I, replicated in a richly metaphorical and yet highly practical elucidation.

When the servants manifest the aforementioned three qualities—and only when they do—the best wine is taken to the wedding master, and he drinks of it.  His response to it is as of one surprised and enlightened:  the best has been kept for last.  It is notable that there are two sides to what is going on in this story.  There is what Jesus has been doing in one location in the presence of the servants–on one side of the wall, as it were.  And there is what’s going on in the banquet hall on the other side of the wall where the wedding master is.  Only the servants go back and forth here between both sides of the wall.  They are the first to know what Jesus has done.  For simplicity, we could equate the servants with each of the three qualities and say that when surrender, effort, and intentionality—all three—are present and aligned with God, then a dipper of wine (God’s presence) is taken from the fullness and given to the wedding master to drink.  Who is the wedding master?  Of course, he is ourselves as that part of us which organizes our lives.  He can remember what the wedding really is, or he can forget.  He can become used to drinking cheap wine.  He can also awaken and know the difference when he is drinking the best.  He himself can be like water or like wine.  And as such, he represents that part of ourselves which can become permeated once again with awareness of God’s presence.

It is telling that the servants move on both sides of the wall.  In this way, they symbolize the soul’s connection to the Source, to the fullness of the divine presence.  Or we could say that they symbolize the soul itself at least in its orientation to that presence.  They are obedient to the divine.  Their effort is an expression of his will.  And their intentionality is the goal of that will made to be their own goal.  Through this tripartite alignment, the soul is attuned to receive God’s call.  This call is known in Kabbalah as chochmah, or “enlightenment.”  When called, the soul is enabled to cross back and forth “around the wall” conveying the divine presence into that part of the human which outwardly orchestrates and directs his life—i.e., into the very ego, I-ness, or specificity of the person.  This specificity is, to some extent, always present with us.  It goes along with living in a body.  However, it is usually once it has become untethered from the divine that we refer to this specificity as “the ego” and something negative.  In itself it does not have to be.  (We may, in fact, have personal experience of someone who seemed quite unique and did indeed act very specifically but seemed to have no ego nonetheless.)

The bride and groom are not described in detail in this story.  But we can understand from the foregoing that the bride and groom represent parts of ourselves that are being brought into loving relationship by the wedding master.  It makes sense, then, that the wedding master, or “personhood,” would be tended by the soul, as depicted by the servants.  The process leading to either increased or decreased awareness is clear.  Without the soul’s care, one is left to drink only water not wine, and the human being becomes fractious and disjointed within.  Divine awareness wanes.  Only the soul can unify all parts of us, and only God’s presence channeled through the soul.  Through the soul’s labor, divine awareness grows.  This, then, is Jesus’s anatomy of increased awareness, the methodological context within which all spiritual practices or disciplines of the Return occur.

There are only one or two other oddities in the Cana story that we need to explore further.

On the other side of the wall, Jesus had already turned the water into wine before the wedding master even tasted it.  What this signifies is that before our individual consciousness becomes aware of anything, God’s will is already done.  And his will here is amply clear:  that the life that he created in us (the water) should be transformed into his presence (wine).  Even before the servants fulfill their roles, the work is already done.  God is bringing us home, or rather, in his eternal Self he has already bought us home.  However, on our side of the wall—on the side of time and space—it is all being worked out in the elaborate ceremony, feast, and unveiling of our life on earth.  This duality is actually meant to inspire supreme confidence.  It is completely congruent with the promise of John 12 that those who have confidence in the name (of the light) should have the extraordinary power of children of God.

The wedding master tastes the wine and names it correctly as the very best wine.  We who are given to know that the water of our lives has already been turned into wine by the power of God’s will (even without knowing how this is accomplished), can have more confidence still in the name of this wine.  The esoteric dimensions of the wedding at Cana expose both sides of the wall.  We are allowed to see that it is God’s eternal intention for us to be replete with his presence.  Not only the wedding master, but everyone at the wedding will drink of this wine in the end, if not all along the journey.  As it is told in the Book of Revelation, we were all written into the Lamb’s Book of Life at the foundation.  God and Jesus mean to let no one be left behind at the end of days.  But we can drink the Lamb’s blood and wine now, by God’s mercy and grace, by aligning our souls the way Jesus teaches here—in accordance with the principles of surrender, effort, and intentionality.  There is a space in time, as we see, between the eternity of God’s intent, and the coming of the wine to the wedding master to drink and enjoy.  However, the wine does come.  He does drink.  He is refreshed and enlightened.  The timing of God’s grace is God’s own timing, but the promise of it is clear:  “Set your souls in alignment like this and I will come into you and you will know me and be able to call me by name.”

And finally, a few more specific details of the anatomy of God-awareness can be inferred from this part of the story.  In particular, we can infer that the servants need to keep going back and forth.  On our side of the wall, as we noted above, practicing the presence is not a one-time affair.  We need to keep doing it.  This strikes an ironic tone again:  by drinking more and more, we get more and more sober.  We know more and more clearly who we are, where we have come from, and what we are capable of.  Since the care of the soul is ours to provide, we have to keep it in shape to be able to answer the Lord’s call to come back around the wall to retrieve more wine.  That is, we have to keep it aligned in the qualities of surrender, effort, and intentionality as instructed so that it can continue to be the vessel for the wine it brings back to the ego or self.  We can expect that Jesus will further illustrate this practice in other stories and actions to come.  But we can already understand it to be an incremental one.

The separation of water and wine is instructive here once more.  We are meant to invite God’s presence (wine) to come into the water of our lives anywhere and everywhere we can so that it suffuses the water completely.  In a sense it already does and already has, on the side of eternity.  But in our temporal world and life we are meant to participate.  We are meant to play a role in this happening locally, in us, and globally.   This is what it means to come from the Father.  We were not created as pawns in a deterministic universe nor as individual wills adrift from divine guidance but as temporal expressions of God’s own eternal self.  The stuff of God is in us working out his intentions on the temporal plane, as long as we come from him.  The outcome is clear for him, less so for us because we are in the process of co-creating it.  What is the power accrued to children of God?  Nothing less than the ability to co-create on the temporal plane what is already contained in God himself in the eternal.

We have been drinking wine for a long time at this wedding of our lives.  At first it was the very best.  But we fell into drinking lesser wine, the wine of our own effort, our own power, unbalanced by surrender to God.   Or we drank the wine of dejection.  We lost hope and became captives of our own failings or the failings of those around us.  We gave up so that our surrender was not balanced by the awareness that God supplants and inhabits our own best efforts.  Drinking this lesser wine, we became unable to hold a clear intention.  Drunk either with power or with self-doubt we lost the ability to be able to discern our direction.  We erred wildly.  We sank like stones.  We also lost the ability to discern good wine.  Any wine would do.  Our stupor perpetuated itself.  That is, until God sent help to his people.  We were reminded and called and are still being reminded to practice differentiating the good wine from the bad.  That way, incrementally, the good wine restores our consciousness.  We learn better and better how to distinguish, taste, and savor it.  We come to place more trust in the promise of Jesus himself that “the sower and the reaper shall be glad together enjoying the harvest” (John 4:36).