Chair's November Blog: Words Before Words - Listening to the Trees

Listening to the Trees

“ A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequency. The tree is saying things, in words before words”

The Overstory, Richard Powers, p.3

I’m being ‘bothered’ by trees at the moment.  Two of them are real, two of them are literary and one is metaphorical. The first tree is the novel from which the quotation above is taken, constructed in tree-form it assumes a living leafy language from the outset. This is one of those moments when the same motif keeps recurring and eventually you just have to follow where it leads you.  The verses of Elizabeth Jennings’ ’November Sonnet’ provide a pathway for my steps

Spirit of place. Spirit of Time. Re-form

The rugged oaks and chestnuts. Now they stand

Naked and pallid out of storm

And out of sorts. It is the Autumns end.

Tree number two is a ‘rugged oak’ outside my window on which I focus during morning reflections. It is currently being ‘reformed’ by the season. Gone is the thick glossy canopy which allowed dazzling darts of sunlight into the room earlier this year. Now I find myself gazing at the classically marked trunk (it looks like a piece of theatrical scenery) and wondering at the solidity and immovability of it. The trunk powers up from the ground and supports crazily angled cantilevered branches that twist and turn into a tortured tangle. The defoliated tree, which looked so stately in full leaf is revealed to be unexpectedly broken and scarred when naked at Autumn’s end. I think of children betrayed and of secrets concealed. 

In places the tree has extended its growth beyond structural possibility and branches have splintered and sheared leaving jagged wounds where scavenging birds and squirrels search for morsels. There are scars where lower boughs have been deliberately removed. Were they dangerous? Or just inconvenient? Or pruned to promote growth? 

As I gaze at the branches I am reminded of my third tree, the name of an organisation - Root and Branch - a metaphor for reform. 

And this is Winter brought in by All Saints

Fast followed by All Souls to keep us in

Touch with chill and death. Each re-acquaints

Us with the year’s end. Yet now we begin 

It is a new organisation that aims to offer an alternative ecclesial structure. Are these the lower boughs so cruelly removed long ago? If so the mighty oak seems unperturbed. Or, as the name suggest is this the force of reform, revealed at the season’s call to prune, shape and prepare for what is to come?

As I write we are in a second lockdown, trying to avoid the global consequences of our actions. The scripture readings carry warnings oddly reminiscent of government slogans: Stay awake! Be Ready! We are shadowed by fear as we long for a saviour, for a vaccine, for a hug.

A life of realism, watching out

For a red sunset, grateful for a dawn

Of rich light now. Tall shadows step and strut

Abuse throws long shadows. The Sacred is defiled, where is your protection now? Which brings me to my fourth tree, considered sacred by the Celtic Church, a yew tree stands on my neighbour’s boundary, offering its evergreen screening to his home, but it impacts the livelihood of his next neighbour. Conflicting interests collide. To avoid disaster they must find a new understanding. Perhaps pruning is too careful, sometimes the tree cannot be saved, it must be felled to allow the Sacred to sprout defiantly from its stump.

And here is my final tree, the Jesse Tree, beloved symbol of Advent, so named because of the passage in Isaiah 11:1 which predicts the coming of the Saviour with the words “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

Facing the Big wind daily coming on

Faster. This is the season of right doubt

While that elected child waits to be born. 

There are forces and circumstances that keep us apart, but, like the trees, at a deep deep level, we are connected.  Our actions impact on the wellbeing of others. We are not free to take our pleasure at the price of pain for others. We are constrained by the need for a Common Good to temper our wants and be attentive to others needs.  

This Advent, may the ‘season of right doubt’ connect us through prayer and preparation. During online prayer this evening one CPW member reminded us that this was also a season of Hope. So with the greenery of Hope and Right Doubt entwined around our advent wreaths let us move forward to the joy that awaits us.