Saintly trees

The final week of a semester, after final projects have been submitted, is usually a time for synthesis - individual and collective. I invite students to look back over their work for the class and bring it together into whatever form seems appropriate. "This is for you," I say, "for future you, to hold on to what you want to make sure not to forget from this class." We get essays, powerpoints, poetry, art... and share them in the class session. So many sets of connections, each different. It's like closing the class with a gorgeous starburst of subjectivities, a kaleidoscope of recharged content.

I often do a final synthesis too - especially for new courses - though I don't always share it. I didn't this time around, since the process of gathering and synthesizing, which usually starts the week before the Thanksgiving break, never had a chance to get going. To tell the truth, I didn't finish the courses either, didn't finish thinking through what our collective work amounted to. I really do let courses take on their own momentum, and this time our momentum died out short of the goal. 

So I don't know what I would have done for "Religion of Trees." A guess? I suppose I might have brought in the words from Thomas Merton that might, in retrospect, have been the seed for this course.

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.

These words from New Seeds of Contemplation, which I first heard at a Sunday night Service of Meditation and Sacrament at the Church of the Ascension in 2016, might have come as a shock to some of the students, since the course was structured to begin with "religion" and then move its attention to the "teachings of trees" beyond human uses and projections. What if we had been moving all along away from "religion" and, in the company of arboreal companions, toward - God?

I could have amplified this with Elizabeth Johnson's suggestion that "At a time when prayer does not come easily to postmodern humans, becoming aware of nature’s praise may actually allow these other creatures to help us pray. … The more we attend to them, the more they can lift our hearts to God, borne on their praise." (Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love [Bloomsbury, 2014], 278) A student's presentation on trees in the Q'uran had already introduced us to the idea that all creation worships its creator, and East Asian materials planned for our final weeks would have made the idea that trees model the Dao or possess the Buddha nature available too. 

But Merton would have been useful also for complicating some of the facile treeloving conclusions some students were moving toward. He didn't think we should worship God by being treelike. We need to be, as God made us, human. But a step into this mystery is offered by the particular glory of each particular tree. 

This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do. Do you imagine that the individual created things in the world are imperfect attempts at reproducing an ideal type which the Creator never quite succeeded in actualizing on earth? If that is so they do not give Him glory but proclaim that He is not a perfect Creator. 

Every particular thing is thus a "saint," from the littlest flower to the vast ocean. At this point I might have observed that Merton found deep resonances between his Christian faith and Zen Buddhism, and gone on to describe the forms of shared practice in which Merton engaged. None of them practices with trees, but we could ask ourselves if our tree drawing was proving itself a congruent practice.

Still, Merton pushes us to face the particular challenge of being created human:

But what about you? What about me? Unlike the animals and the trees, it is not enough for us to be what our nature intends. It is not enough for us to be individual men. For us, holiness is more than humanity. If we are never anything but men, never anything but people, we will not be saints and we will not be able to offer to God the worship of our imitation, which is sanctity. ... 

At this point I might have brough in Pope Francis' idea of an "integral ecology" in Laudato Sí. To recognize our interconnectedness with the rest of creation doesn't mean there isn't a special vocation for human beings, which is tied up with the free will we alone appear to have. This was Merton's point, too. But one could turn here toward indigenous ideas like those we'd encountered in Robin Wall Kimmerer: trees are persons, people, but so are we, and what it means to be persons is to be in mutual relation with other persons. 

One lesson of our tree teachers is that it's our job to work out, or remember, or discover how to be human. And one lesson of "Religion of Trees" might be that human people have been learning better and worse way of being human from better and worse understandings of the glory of tree people for a long time, people with whom we share more and different things than most of us moderns can even imagine.

(The swan-neck agave pictured at top is in Del Mar)