We were able to spend some time over the Christmas break with family and friends back in Calgary. I went by the old house, curious about my tree, but the new residents were sitting there so it was a drive-by. Still, it triggered my memory and I remembered that I said I would write a post explaining why I would post ten journal entries about a tree which, I imagine, was strange to some. When I worked at the University, the students would laugh each time I mentioned my tree journal. It sounds like a strange practice and, in some ways at least, is a strange practice. But since something can be strange for a number of reasons, we often have to pause and ask why something is strange.
A few years ago I accompanied a group of students from various faith (or no faith) backgrounds on a weeklong religious field trip of sorts. It was an award winning project that two of my former colleagues created called The Kaleidoscope Project, and it was an absolute joy to help lead as a chaplain chaperone. Each day we focused on one religion and visited various religious sites, often very different from each other, from within the same religion. On the day we explored Christianity, for example, we had an overview of the faith from a mainline priest in the morning, attended a portion of a Coptic Mass in the afternoon, and then went to an extremely charismatic young adult gathering in the evening. The next day we would do the same thing, but with a different religion. One of the things that struck on the day we focused on Buddhism was a practice my Buddhist colleague Ken referred to (as best as I can recall) as “first drink” or perhaps “first sip.” He talked about the practice of paying attention to your first drink – coffee, water, whatever – in the morning. How did it taste? What was the temperature like? What did it feel like going down? What did you notice as you sipped? The next morning I went to Starbucks by myself before the day’s activities began and tried it. It’s more difficult than one would imagine. With a million things vying for my attention I found it hard to focus yet simultaneously rewarding when I was disciplined enough to pay attention to the one thing that was right in front of me. Perhaps it seems that paying attention to a cup of coffee is foolishness when people all around us are starved for attention. What I’ve been learning, however, is that paying attention to what we often label as “things,” is a way of training ourselves to pay attention not just to coffee or a tree, as important as that is, but also to life itself.
Elizabeth Oldfield writes about standing outside of a church midweek and pondering whether she should go in or not. She says that if she went in it would go something like this:
“I would sit in a similar wood and stone hall and emerge not pulled hurriedly into the restless future but steadied and settled by being rethreaded into time’s unspooling. My day would be shaped by joining a slow patient song that started before I was born and that will be sung long after I am dead.”1
There are beautiful liturgical implications here for another day, but I love the idea of being “rethreaded into time’s unspooling.” Yet she admits,
“Standing on the street between the station and the church, these thoughts flashed past me. Then I got out my phone and hurried home, scrolling.”2
So back to the tree. It was an assignment and one I dreaded. Couldn’t we just read the stunning theological works we were given and get on with it? Yet a strange thing happened to me as I pondered the tree – I pondered my own life in a way I otherwise wouldn’t have. Actually slowing down and paying attention to the seemingly mundane and slow change of a co-creature (the tree in my front yard) had an astonishing effect on me. It rethreaded me when I was unravelling. Here are just three things I noticed over the course of paying attention to the tree.
1. The longer I stayed with it, the more it worked on me.
My initial journal entries were relatively dull. I imagine many of you gave up after the first or second entry. I don’t blame you. But as time went on I found things coming alive in me that lay dormant somewhere beneath the surface. We take in so much in this life and yet we fail, without solitude or deep conversation, to realize what ideas, unformed connections, or feelings are within us. The longer I was able to attend to one thing, however, the more things within me began to emerge. They were not new things, they were just buried or unintegrated things – something that someone once said to me, or perhaps a passage I read many years ago, these things bubbled to the surface. Creativity, healing and integration take time and require a certain pace. The entries became both more creative and emotive with time. I realized that I was walking through a lot of difficulty but wasn’t taking time to process it. There was, as there always is if we live a certain way, too much to do, not to mention certain sorrows that were too heavy to ignore. As the tears rolled down my cheeks when I typed the words “all the leaves have fallen,” however, I realized that I needed to slow down and deal with the pain of the darkness I had encountered. I needed a different pace and more openness to my own life and the things around me.
2. My assumptions blind me to reality
I was astounded by how many times I was certain that the tree was a certain way but upon actually going to examine it up close realized I was completely wrong. Assumption is a dangerous thing. We assume we know what people are like, even those closest to us, but without intentional closeness or curiosity we are often deeply and dangerously mistaken. As I’m writing this I recall this beautiful passage that I read years ago by Frederick Buechner from his sermon “The Church.”
A fat man drives by in his Chevy pickup with a cigarette in his mouth and on his rear bumper a sticker that says Jesus Loves You. There’s a shotgun slung across the back window. He is not a stranger we’ve never seen before and couldn’t care less if we ever see again. He is our brother, our father. He is our son. It is true that we have never seen him before and that we will probably never see him again—just that one quick glimpse as he goes by at twenty-five miles an hour because it is a school zone—but if we can somehow fully realize the truth of that, fully understand that this is the one and only time we will ever see him, we will treasure that one and only time the way we treasure the rainbow in the sky or the ring we finally found under the rug after years of looking for it. The old woman with thick glasses who sits in front of us at the movies eating popcorn is our mother, our sister, our child grown old, and once we know that, once we see her for who she truly is, everything about her becomes precious—the skinny back of her neck, the way she puts her hand over her mouth when she laughs.3
I’ll never forget backing out of a parking spot when my Dad was dying and watching out of my rearview mirror a car who didn’t see me backing up and therefore didn’t slow down. I was livid. I was honking the horn and yelling like a madman. I’m not proud of this moment. But I’ll never forget how Marisa gently put her hand on mine and said, “they don’t know what you’re going through.” The assumption about me could have been that I was nothing but an egotistical angry maniac. The truth, however, was I was reeling from grief which was being expressed as anger. Unfortunately, I have all kinds of assumptions about people and fail to look closely. I have assumptions about the man with the shotgun slung across the back window. While I may get a few of his political or even religious leanings right (maybe), I fail to acknowledge him for who he is and what has shaped him because I fail to understand the moment as encounter and the man as a person. At a distance he remains an idea. Up close or curiously pondered, however, he, like every human being, is a glorious mystery. As Buencher says,
“These are not ordinary people any more than life is ordinary. They are extraordinary people. Life is extraordinary, and the extraordinariness of it is what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God.”4
The same goes for much in life. We assume we know what a biblical text is saying, for example, but we fail to truly ponder it and miss what is actually there precisely through the details we fill in due to our own assumptions.
This exercise helped me begin to see just how much I wrongly assume. It reminded me of the need to be curious and attentive and lean in closer.
3. The stories have shaped my imagination more than I realize
Given time, the sacred stories I’ve heard a million times came back to me but in new ways, reminding me how I’m shaped by them in ways I can’t fully comprehend. They are a part of me. The bird on the tree reminded me of Jesus call to abide in him, “our loving vine-dresser.”5 I suddenly saw the cross not as a “weapon of torture,” but as one of God’s creatures who upheld Jesus in his hour of greatest need. The attention to the tree brought these stories which have shaped my life to the surface. I began to wonder, too, if in this moment of ecological crisis if we, blind to the world, weren’t like the blind man at Bethsaida, but in reverse.6 After Jesus laid his hands upon that man he asked, “Do you see anything?” The man said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking.” Jesus had to lay his hands on the man a second time. In our own time and with our deadly cocktail of anthropocentrism and unbridled power, we have the inability to see a thing for what it really is, especially our fellow non-human creatures. The tree is nothing more than something for us to use. Even this post is in danger of this. And so all things are often seen through a human lens and for human usefulness or satisfaction. We only see ourselves. We see trees in a sense, but they look like people walking. We are in need of Jesus to touch our eyes again to see the world as gift and to see the tree as a tree, which is its way of glorifying its Creator. All of these connections, however, only came when I slowed down enough to look at one thing, which helped me to see all things with fresh eyes. The biblical stories I’ve read weren’t far from the surface, but they required me to inhabit time and place in a certain way.
It’s easy to say of things around us, ‘it’s just a tree,’ or ‘it’s just a cup of coffee.’ But everything that exists, absolutely everything, exists out of the overflow of the love that is God and we’re far more connected to many of these things, and to each other through these things, than we think. The coffee in our cup was planted, harvested, packaged, shipped, brewed and perhaps even poured by others. It went through many, many hands to get to us. And so while I say that it is a strange practice to ponder it, it is only strange because we live in a world where we have traded pondering for scrolling and closeness for utility. I’ve found that by learning to appreciate what is in front of me – something I’m admittedly often not so good at – I’ve learned not only to appreciate the thing for what it is in itself, but also, as Buechner instructs, to listen to my life.
*If you’re new here and interested in reading any of aforementioned entries you can start here. Otherwise, stay tuned for more posts (not usually on trees) to come.
**The preview image is by Tim Foster and can be found here. It was taken in Nova Scotia, the land in which I was planted in my formative years.
Elizabeth Oldfield, “An Accumulation of Meaning: Keeping Sacred Time Amid the linear Rush of the Secular,” Comment: Public Theology for the Common Good, (Winter 2023): 20.
ibid.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 149.
ibid.
From Teilhard de Chardin’s wonderful “Patient Trust”
See Mark 8:22-30