the blessed assurance of trees

 

“While I am looking for something large, bright, and unmistakably holy, God slips something small, dark and apparently negligible in my pocket.” Barbara Brown Taylor

I have fallen in love with the most unlikely, for me, community of worship.

The objects of my new affection are the gorgeous recently planted trees lining the landscape of our new home! 

I walk Nellie and am filled with something like awe, something like wonder, something like gratitude and I want to sing or shout or dance (and I even do when no one is looking!?!?)

The feeling I am discovering is akin to that which Thomas Merton announced upon emerging from the subway in Louisville: 

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”

― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

The amazing thing is that I experience this every time I simply remind myself to pay attention and gaze (thank you Mary Oliver); the wonder is with me all the time now, like grace.

I am also realizing that when one falls in love, or into love, one takes in wisdom. The trees and I are learning how to be in a mutually enriching relationship! I pray with them, I bless them, they bless me; it is communion.

And in these most difficult times when hope feels thin and anxiety heavy, I feel that the trees and their beauty and simple elegance and faithfulness are saving me. 

I am looking for a big fat miracle, I am looking for a loud booming assurance, and yet when still and grateful, I am finding the still small voice of a steadfast God.

It comes in the form of various steadfast angels of creation. It comes in greens and blues and browns and smooth surfaces and variegated surfaces. The birds guide my gaze and beckon me to alight on a branch. 

This must be blessedly, assuredly, unmistakably holy.