Thursday, March 27
Arboreal Faith
Let no eunuch say, “And, I am a dried-up tree.” For Yahweh says this: I will give, in my house and within my walls…a name better than sons and daughters…and everlasting name that shall never be cut off… – Isaiah 56:1-8
Rev Robert Raines is a former UMC pastor who later converted to the United Church of Christ and then famously served as the Director of the Kirkridge Retreat Center in Pennsylvania. I had the opportunity while as guest of Kirkridge to spend some personal time with him and thus to become a great fan of his writings and sermons. This borrows heavily from his book A Faithing Oak Meditations from the Mountain.
Raines tells the story of an early summer infestation of gypsy moths eating the leaves and browning the Appalachian Mountains. Not only the trees and underbrush but the buildings of the retreat center were covered in gypsy caterpillars. Some one thought it funny to put up a sign: “This building defended by attack worms.” But it wasn’t really that funny!
An old, lone oak tree on the retreat grounds, a readily visible and admired backdrop or silhouette for the sunsets and spring flowers of the grassy valley stood leafless, lifeless. Its gray bare branches shaped by the harsh winds of its lifetime of many winters were naked for all to see and lament.
It may not be just a eunuch that posits the statement “And I, I am a dried-up tree.” Just having had a birthday I’ve been looking back at more productive days and recognizing some loss of energy and hope. Like many I’ve been fearing for a nation that seems to have lost its mind and who has not been fought of some future calamity for the world these days? Death has visited some and left them without intimacy and nurture. This season, even without the observance of the holy season of Lent, can leave us cut off from our roots and feeling sterile. The future can look barren. We find ourselves feeling like spiritual eunuchs; the fires of faith grown dim.
And I, am I a dried-up tree?
But one morning, just a few weeks later at the end of June, one of the retreatants gathered the others together to look closely at the dried-up tree. She asked them to run their hands over its limbs and to touch its leafless fingertips. In amazement they found buds…refoliation had already begun urging forth a second leafing. The retreatant group beheld a faithing oak.
As people of faith “we would be faithing oaks who, having known the sacrament of defeat, yet stand there withered and weathered, who confound the odds, turn the season on their heads, putting forth seeds of hope in autumn and insisting on Easter in midwinter. What is this outrageous grace that makes a fool of infesting Death, and raises up a faithing oak?” (Raines)
Scientists have found evidence of marine life deposits millions of years old at the top of Mount Everest, earth’s highest mountain above sea level. That’s just under 30,000 feet above sea level and The Bay of Bengal is 430 miles away. Who is it that can move mountains into the sea and back again or the sea to the top of the tallest pinnacle of earth? Who can sit with a dying or dead loved one and believe there will be joy in the morning? Who is it that can seek time after time the restoration of a friendship? Who is it that will reverse the values of a nation spending millions on recreation while reversing budgets for children’s school meals?
We would/must be faithing oaks. We are to be the embodiment of the aching wisdom of the survivor. We must stake our future in the grace of refoliation, resurrection, restoration, rebirthing…
Rev. Larry Norman