As I sheltered I was filled with a deep grief and sadness for my cousin Cheryl who is still with us at the time of writing, it was her birthday on Friday, she turned 42. There are other deep sadness around too, my heart feels broken, certainly tender. As I stood there sheltering, protected by the tree, Barbara a lovely member at Dunham Road, one of the congregations I serve came running past. She stopped for a while and we chatted. I then left the shelter of the tree to return to life. I have bumped into Barbara several times over the last couple of weeks, what a deep hearted caring woman she is.
As I carried on walking in the pouring rain the wonderful poem “I go among trees” by Wendell Berry was singing in my heart.
“I Go Among Trees” by Wendell Berry
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
As I walked on I felt some of the fears in me leave me and I found myself singing some familiar songs. I’ve been singing a lot recently, so many songs. I found myself singing songs to life itself. I felt I was being held by the tree of life, a celebration of life in midst of love and loss and grief. I thought of the Jewish toast “l’chaim”, to life. Don’t we all tend the tree of life and don’t we all shelter under it too.
I love the symbolism of the tree of life, it is beautifully universal. It represents such a nurturing love. I think in our secular age we have lost some of the power and deep meaning of symbols. I have a growing appreciation for the old symbols, they reveal deep truths that are sometimes hidden, that words alone do not reveal. The mythologist Joseph Campbell taught that certain images and pictures invite the eye not to merely rush along but to rest a while and dwell within the revelation that can be found by looking deeply into them. I was thinking of this as I passed all those beautiful trees, so strong and sturdy, offering shelter from the rain. They are a toast to life itself. The tree is the symbol of life. This is why the “Tree of Life” is a universal symbol.
“l’chaim”, to life.
The trees have much to teach us. My name sake and American colleague Rev Greta W. Crosby recognises this. In “Tree and Jubilee” she describes a silent none judgemental presence that the trees offer her, something we humans cannot give no matter how well we may think we are at listening. The trees simply stand there erect and open, never shrinking away or rejecting, offering unconditional love and acceptance. She wrote:
“I have long had a sense of fellowship with trees. Since I was a child, I have sought their company from time to time because I like the way I feel in their presence. I enjoy their beauty, but it is more than that. I used the word “presence” in a very strong sense. I felt their presence as living things. And in that presence, I often feel relaxed and centered, peaceful, restored to inner equilibrium.”
She continues…
“For many of us, life is the meaning of the tree. But for me, perhaps the greatest thing about the tree is its silence. Whatever the tree says to us, whatever it answers to our questing, the tree gives its message without words. And the tree bears with us well. It does not judge. It does not react to our anxieties. It does not run after us. It just stands there with open arms.”
The tree to me is the ultimate symbol of life. We all tend and nurture the tree of life. “l’chaim”, to life.
The “Tree of Life” is a beautiful and universal symbol it can be found in many of the worlds religious traditions. The ancient Chinese, Assyrians, Egyptians, Baylonians and Samarians all had a tree of life symbol. There is Ygdrassil, the Norse Tree of Life, The Etz Ha Hayim of the Kaballistic Jews. The Bahai's speak of it and Christians of all kinds speak of the tree of life, with healing leaves, found in the Book of Revelations. The book of Genesis tells of two trees: a Tree of Knowledge, which is the tree of good and evil, and the Tree of Life, the tree of immortality. Of course in Genesis 2 they ate the forbidden fruit, the “Tree of Knowledge”, as the result Adam and Eve are banished from paradise, from life I suspect.
As I continued to wander round Dunham I recalled a conversation I had a few days earlier, in the very same spot, with a friend. We were talking about where this sense of wrongness we humans can feel at times comes from. Something we have both shared, something sadly so many do. Where does this rejection of life come from? We talked about the foundational stories in Genesis. Of course it is all Mythos. It is not history to be argued over factual accuracy. Mythos is Universal Truth, the question to ask is does this speak to a deeper truth that we can find in ourselves, does it speak throughout time?
Now of course some reject the Bible as outdated and not only inaccurate but downright destructive. I do not, I think there is so much to engage with still. That said only in a symbolic sense. I explained to my friend how it actually begins with “Original Blessing”, in Genesis chapter one. God looked at his creation and saw that it was good. That life is a good thing, that we are formed from good, not wrong. There is no original sin, only original blessing, that blessing is formational, that life is formed from goodness. The concept of “Original Sin” was actually a creation of the later church, mainly Augustine and his self-loathing, Which I believe is a rejection of his own original blessing, something I can personally relate to at times, as sadly so many folk do.
The trouble begins in the second creation story, in the Garden of Eden. That said if we look at this symbolically rather than literally there is so much beautiful mythos to be unearthed. The original human Adam meant born from the earth. Human, humus, humility all share same linguistic root, born from the earth, not God, but finite, limited, but beautiful. Yes we are born, but we also die. This is life.
Originally we enjoy paradise, the fruits of life. There is no shame, no sense of wrongness no rejection of our lives, no destruction of ourselves and or others. We simply enjoy paradise. We have something else though. We want more, we seek more. This is where all creativity is born, but can also cause trouble. We are the only aspect of created life that experiences dissatisfaction. We want more.
So we eat the forbidden fruit, we want the knowledge, we suffer Hubris. We lose that beautiful gift of innocence, we are cast out by a sense of shame, especially with our humanity. We leave paradise.
We can though return to love to blessing, but the journey is long and arduous, not that we go anywhere. To quote Meister Eckhart, it could be of one inch, but a depth beyond any depth, layer upon layer. We return home, we go full circle, we don't go back on ourselves. We come home with treasure to share. This is the classic heroic journey. The truth of every great story, the Universal Mythos. The key is to return home to love. That though comes in later stories. I often think of the prodigal son here. With the boy returning home to the open arms of his father who greets him halfway, celebrates his return and embraces his son, with a kiss. An act of pure love. Can there be anything more intimate. It seems to me there is nothing considered wrong in this child born of love. Yet so often we do not feel we are formed from this, it is just so sad.
Now of course this is only my view of the mythos and it is certainly not orthodox in any way shape or form. My interpretation is life affirming, it celebrates life, the traditional view does not. As Joseph Campbell, that great mythologist, has said the orthodox interpretation is “a refusal to affirm life.” Life is seen as corrupt. It sees the serpent as the symbol that brought sin into the world and woman as the figure who handed the apple to man. My friend was explaining this to me as we walked round Dunham the other day. As Campbell says “This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist the has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall.... I don't know of it [the idea of woman as sinner...in other mythologies] elsewhere.”
The traditional understanding sees life as the problem, especially human life and sees the female, the bringer of life, as the root of the trouble. How long have we all suffered as a result of this rejection of life and woman as central to it. We see it clearly today, it has not gone away, in fact if anything the trouble seems to be intensifying. For me the problem stems from this fear of life itself. Surely though life is good. Maybe the solution is the “Tree of Life”. It nurtures us if we tend to it and it will offer us shelter. “l’chaim”, to life.
There is an eternal wisdom in the trees. The Buddha gained enlightenment beneath the Bodhi Tree. The tree blessed him as it did so showering him with blossom. In ancient Christian imagery Jesus is crucified on the “Holy Rued”, “The Tree of Life”, the second tree in the garden of Eden, from this life comes again, as does fruit that can sustain us. As Joseph Campbell highlighted man was expelled from the garden because he ate from the first tree, the “Tree of Knowledge”. The garden was the place of unity of none duality, “non-duality of male and female, none duality of man and God, none-duality of good and evil.” The tree of immortal life brings us back to paradise, to unity to life itself. Where two become one. This is identical to the tree that Buddha sits under, the tree of life is the universal symbol of life itself.
“l’chaim”, to life
Sadly it seems that so many folk are as afraid of life as we are of death. It seems to me that these ancient stories, in their essence at least, are trying to teach that death is in life as life is in death. This is the story of existence of which we are all a part of. Yet for me some reason we reject life in so many ways, we are frightened of being cast out of it, we crucify it, we torture it we persecute and distrust. We fear our own humanity, our mortality. We say there is no good in us and no good in the other.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We are born from “Original Blessing”, original goodness. This is our natural state, that too often we lose sight of. We are all formed from the tree of life, the tree of renewal, the tree of re-birth. We need to recognise this. Sometimes this comes when we lose something or someone precious to us, somehow in this suffering we turn back home again, we return to paradise. We find wholeness once again, we recognise our own sacredness and that of others. We return to the “Tree of Life” and we tend to it and it tends to us. Just as I did that rainy morning seeking shelter under the tree in Dunham Massey.
May we know this wisdom and may we bring it to life through our very being.
“l’chaim”, to life
I am going to end with a little bit of Mary Oliver “The Summer Day”. Mary has been singing in my heart a lot these last few days.
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Below is a devotion based on
the material in this "blogspot"
No comments:
Post a Comment