Up here in Canada when the sun becomes stronger and warmer in late February or in March, and when the nights are still below freezing, the sap in our Sugar Maple trees begins to rise in the tree and then descends each night. As this photo on the left shows, when these trees are tapped, sap can quickly fill up a pail at-tached to the tap.

We do not tap our trees each year, but this year we did…there had been lots of snow, and the winter had been cold – it seemed that it would be a good season, and it is! So with us Nuns here at the Carmel of St. Agatha, it often seems that the sap runs most freely during Holy Week, so we too become busy collecting the sap. When we have enough we have a boiling.

So this year, this parable came to mind. To produce maple syrup, the ratio is about 40 to 1. In other words, 40 gallons of sap will produce 1 gallon of very sweet syrup. We boil this syrup the old-fashioned way, evaporating the sap over an outdoor wood fire in a large pan set over the fire on bricks. This takes several hours, and each time we may obtain 3 gallons of syrup.

So it doesn’t take much reflection to see how this relates to our spiritual life. In each of us, despite our sincere efforts to grow in self-forgetfulness, and in prayerful union with God, there still remains an imbalance of self to God. Would it even be 40 of me to 1 of God?! But God has a remedy! He can place our sincere self-offering over a trial of fire, and then much of self is evaporated! This trial of fire, of course, is God’s love – always it is His Love. And this fire is always effective. One needs only to taste the finished syrup to realize how much sweetness and goodness there is in the watery sap which, when placed over a good fire, becomes the famous Maple Syrup.

So we can have confidence that God truly knows how to make a good, sweet and finished work of each of us!