November 23, 2022
Data
I counted eleven cherries still hanging from the tree. They are similar in color to last week. One cherry seemed to be peeling, coming apart. It was rather high up so I’m assuming it is either experiencing a natural process or perhaps a bird had a go at it.
The snow has at last melted around the base of the tree, so I had a good look at it and reached down to touch it. The bark is actually very smooth around the base. About a foot-and-a-half up the bark is a lot rougher though, but then it smooths out again. I shook the tree tonight as well. It has a real spring in its step. When it was colder, I imagined it to be far less flexible than it actually is. Now as I think of it, it was only a couple of months ago, perhaps, when I watched it bend with the wind. The weather does strange things to our imagination.
Affect
I’ve often thought about how trees mark my memories, like the tree in Michigan where God met me, or the trees at camp which marked my summers. This week, however, I’ve been wondering if the trees hold our memories. Do they remember us like we remember them? Did the willows hold the sorrow like they held the harps near the rivers of Babylon? Did the great tree of Mamre hold the memory of Abram like it held his body, tired from the journey? Did I perhaps want to return to the tree in Grand Rapids not only because it marked a moment, but held a piece of me within it? Did I want to be remembered?
I’m now recalling that I once began writing a song about this very thing (though I never finished it). Here are a few of the lyrics:
Oh, great tree of Moreh
Tell me your story
Sing me your song
For there under your branches
Taking his chances
Sat a great saint of old
And then closer to my then home…
Oh, great trees of Georgia
...[incomplete line]
I ask you again
Who sat here before me
And told you their story
Like and old faithful friend
Then a change in melody and mood:
Oh, Poplars of Babylon
Sing us your sad song
Remember it well…
Perhaps I’ll finish this song someday. After 20 years of writing songs, I suppose I’ve hung my harp as well in recent years. I suppose I’ve swapped being a psalmist for being an armchair scribe. Maybe I’ll take the harp off the branches again someday.
Anyhow, perhaps it’s all just melancholy as my own life changes, but perhaps not. I sometimes think of how churches who stopped using wooden pews couldn’t just do away with the wood but repurposed it for some other aesthetic purpose in the building. It’s like they knew the pews held the memories – the laughter, the anger, and tears – and they couldn’t let it go lest they let the memories go along with it. As Justin Phillips (a board member at the church where I’m about to serve as pastor) writes:
“our collective memory can help protect us from our own worst impulses. When we go
astray, we must say to one another, ‘This is not who we are.’”1
Perhaps the trees remind us too, ‘This is not who you are. We know your story!”
Justin R. Phillips, Know Your Place: Helping White, Southern Evangelicals Cope with the End of The(ir) World (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021), 58.