Last week’s blog on living the “in-between times” (“Life is an Advent“), originally had a different ending. After agonizing over multiple revisions, I finally cut the original ending and decided to make it a blog in its own right. And voila, here it is!

However, in the “in between-time” between severing the ending from its original context and sitting down to write what you are now reading, the Lord blew me away with an improbable “coincidence.” Here’s what happened.

Three days after posting Blog #8, I flew to Vancouver, Canada, to speak at their archdiocesan seminary for a week. I arranged to fly in a day early and spend a bit of time with one of my favorite Filipino couples, Nick and Norma Borja, who introduced me seven years ago to my adopted spiritual family, Couples for Christ.

As we sat in my favorite Chinese restaurant in Richmond – the hub of Chinese culture in Greater Vancouver – Nick casually asked me if I’d like to join them the next morning for a Couples for Christ celebration of the First Fruits. In the very noisy, family restaurant, I thought perhaps I misheard him – First Fruits? Who ever uses that term much less has a New Year’s tradition to celebrate it? Nick and Norma could never have known that my next blog, yes, this blog, was intended to be on the topic of First Fruits. But God knew, and He was confirming it in a completely unmistakable way.

When you hear the term, “first fruits,” how does it grab you? Does it render you speechless? Does it make your heart pound and your emotions elevate with great expectation and anticipation? Probably not because it just sounds like two words put together – “first” and “fruits” to mean we pick the first apples or oranges or artichokes and then, ho hum, we go on our way.

I would have been “ho-humming” right alongside you if I hadn’t discovered this word in Spanish. What is rendered “first fruits” in English is a single word in Spanish: primicia.

One of the unexpected bonuses of studying a foreign language is that colorless and emotionally vapid words in English sometimes explode with vivid imagery and emotional content. This is certainly what happened as I encountered primicia over and over again in the prayers of the Mass and Scripture readings. As part of my effort to learn Spanish from scratch, I developed the habit of following the Mass prayers and Scripture readings in Spanish. As a result, primicia repeatedly surfaced, luring me into to its deeper content.

Instead of hearing “first fruits” as two words stuck together, I began to understand primicia as a single word and therefore a multi-layered concept. It’s like the difference between foot ball and football or girl friend and girlfriend. Foot ball indicates a ball that you kick with your foot. That’s fairly logical, but not very exciting. Football, on the other hand, provokes strong images of husky linebackers, Hail-Mary passes, desperate fourth downs, and stunning Super Bowl victories and defeats.

Likewise, girl friend indicates a pal or acquaintance that you like to hang around with whereas girlfriend signifies a special and usually more exclusive relationship. Most likely your girlfriend might ditch you if you introduced her to your parents as a friend who just happens to be a girl. Are you following my drift?

Similarly, as I repeatedly heard the single word primicia instead of the dual-combo of “first fruits,” I began to realize that primicia refers to a whole event and not just the initial portion of a harvested crop. It is the multi-layered event of offering thanksgiving to God along with the confidence that there will be more. Put briefly, primicia always contains within it the promise of more!

Primicia is a deeply Jewish concept for an agricultural culture that couldn’t breeze into Wal-Mart at any time of year and buy avocados, blueberries, bread, or pre-made spaghetti sauce. When the primicia arrived, there would be dancing and celebration and hearty thanksgiving! What had taken time, cultivation, patience, and growth was now beginning to bear fruit, to nourish life.

Primicia never refers to the middle or end of the harvest, but always and only to the beginning. In other words, primicia, the First Fruits, contain within them the promise that there will be more! More harvest to come! More celebration and more rejoicing to come! This is just the beginning, so keep watching, keep waiting, keep attending to the tasks (crops) at hand because there’s more!

This is the spirit of Our Lady that we touched on in the last blog. Not only did she live the spirit of Advent, she also lived in the spirituality of primicia, of the first fruits. She knew that the conception and birth of Jesus Christ – the greatest work of the Holy Spirit in the history of humanity – was just the beginning of the marvels that God intended to perform.

In Romans 8:29, Scripture tells us that Jesus of Nazareth is the first-born of many brethren. He is the primicia – the first fruit – of the human race united (in a wedding!) to God. In 2 Corinthians 1:22 and Ephesians 1:14, the Holy Spirit is described as the down payment, the pledge, the primicia of the full work of spousal redemption that Christ will bring to fulfillment at His Second Coming. Whenever we read or hear primicia – first fruits/down payment/pledge/guarantee – our hearts should dance and celebrate with the great expectation that with God, THERE IS ALWAYS MORE!

With all this in mind, let’s go back to Vancouver and Couples for Christ’s celebration of the First Fruits. As I discovered, this is an annual event occurring on the first Saturday of the New Year. It’s a kind of remembering – a remembering that everything is gift from God (cf. 1 Corinthians 4:7: “What do you have that you did not receive?”) – and an exhortation to never forget. Moses gave this same kind of exhortation to the people of Israel before they entered the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

In Deuteronomy 6:10-12, Moses tells the Israelites, “And when the Lord your God brings you into the land which He swore to your father Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and excellent cities, which you did not build and houses full of good things, which you did not fill…and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take heed lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

For the Jewish people, the Promised Land itself was a kind of primicia: it was God’s initial promise that there would be more. However, with this “more” also came the caution to never forget God as the Origin of all the goodness and abundance they would experience. Celebrating the “First Fruits” on the first Saturday of the New Year is a sober reminder for us as well who live in a land of plenty and abundance to never forget.

A similar caution occurs in Preface II of the Mass prayers for Lent. Roughly translated from the Spanish, it says: “You have generously established this time of grace [i.e., Lent] to renew your children in holiness, so that, free from all disordered affection, we can live temporal realities as primicia [first fruits] of the eternal realities.”

The light bulbs exploded in my mind the first time I heard this prayer. Like the Israelites, the world around us is not first and foremost for our own comfort and consumerism, as if it were our “right” to use it and enjoy it without any thought of the Divine Creator and Redeemer. On the contrary, the created world is a constant reminder of God’s presence and goodness to us. The good and beautiful things of this world fill us with joy precisely because they are the primicia, the first fruits, of the eternal realities to come. They are God’s promise of even fuller and more abundant eternal realities of the Kingdom to come (“…thy Kingdom come…).

This syncs incredibly well with St. John Paul II’s repeated insistence on the sacramentality of creation. In speaking about the “sacrament of creation” in his “Theology of the Body,” St. JPII says in Audience 98:8: “Here, ‘sacrament’ means the very mystery of God, which is hidden from eternity, yet not in an eternal concealment” and also in Audience 97:5: “…when we speak about the realization of the eternal mystery, we are speaking also about the fact that it becomes visible with the visibility of the sign.”

In other words, the invisible, eternal realities of God’s Trinitarian Mystery of TOTAL Self-Giving Love and Life, which are inaccessible to our incarnational mode of knowledge, begin to be accessible to us through the visibility of the created world, especially through the body. In the light of Christ (cf. GS 22), we can now see how God created the human body “in the beginning” as the original primicia that anticipated the Incarnation. From the beginning, the human body in its masculinity and femininity is the “first fruit” of God’s promise that there will be more – the “more” of the Incarnated Body of Christ, the Divine Bridegroom, who will take what is hidden from eternity in God – the invisible Trinitarian Divinity – and make it visible through His TOTAL gift of self to humanity through His Body.

With all this in mind, perhaps we can hear TOB Audience 19:4 about the sacramentality of the body with new fervor: “The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” What a joy to realize over and over again the deep sacramentality of the body! What a joy as laity to be prophetic witnesses in the midst of society and culture to the goodness of creation as an event through which God reveals Himself and the spousal meaning of history!

Today I encourage you to take a moment and thank God for the primicia of your body – and all creation – as a sign and promise of the goodness and abundance of the eternal, invisible realities to come. So keep watching, keep waiting, keep celebrating and rejoicing in the tasks at hand because there’s always more! And remember…you (and your visible body) are a gift!

© Katrina J. Zeno, MTS