Some people brought a blind man to [Jesus] and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, ‘Can you see anything?’ And the man looked up and said, ‘I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.’ Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. (Mark 5:22-5, NRSV)
The "religion" part of "Religion of trees" finally clicked today, or clicked into place, as I was mapping out the final chapter. My interest really hasn't been in what is usually celebrated or deplored as "worship of trees," though I devote a chapter to the construct of "the sacred tree," and offer novel takes on the Bodhi tree, the Tree of Life in the Heavenly Jerusalem and Christmas trees. I try to suggest that it's entirely unsurprising that trees in their prodigious variety provided material and metaphorical material for human religious traditions, since they provided such material for every part of human life and culture. But to see that one needs to get beyond monolithic western ideas of trees, and of our relationships with them, especially in the age of fossil fuels. We're a lot less like trees than facile romantic ideas about our kinship as vertically oriented beings reaching from the earth toward the sky might suggest, and a lot more dependent on them than we may care to admit. The relationships are all of them asymmetrical, and yet in many cases symbiotic.
And so: religion? I remembered one of the folk etymologies of religion as tracing to re-ligare, to re-bind. I used, long ago, to teach Wilfred Cantwell Smith's The Meaning and End of Religion, which argued that the Latin religio was long an obscure and unimportant word, only in modern times and unhelpfully applied to faith traditions. He mentions this along with a competing ancient etymology, re-legere (to re-read), but his point is that there's no clear source and even if there were the term is ultimately unilluminating. My generation of religious studies scholars takes the limitations of the term "religion" for granted.
But this hasn't stopped theologians from claiming one or other of these etymologies as revealing the true meaning of religion, and, while they are wrong to claim a clear etymology, they often make interesting points. I feel like joining them - though of course I'll mention that the history is obscure. Good pragmatist, I'll suggest that etymology can't settle the question, but thinking of religion as re-ligare may be helpful for thinking about humans and trees.
So: helpful - why? Because human life, like every form of life, emerged in ecosystems of tangled interdependence with myriad symbiotic species. Trees were among these symbionts, and, if they had hundreds of millions of years without us, they're stuck in relationship with us for the foreseeable future, and we with them. Pretending otherwise is historically wrong and politically and spiritually unhelpful. We must reduce our carbon and other footprints but a world from which human beings could discreetly withdraw is a dangerous fantasy. What's needed is rediscovering, reviving, re-imagining our relationships with trees. And not from a distance, but in embodied relationships of giving and taking.
Okay, so undoing the "severing of relations," which Heather Davis and Zoe Todd have convinced me is the fatal colonial heart of the Anthropocene, could be linked to re-binding, religare. (I stumbled on this thought once before.) But why not just talk about relationships? Because most of our modern ideas of relationships are premised on ideas of reciprocity, mutuality, balance which are thwarted by the assymmetries of our relationships with trees: for starters they're so much slower and bigger and older than we, and we take so much more from them than we could ever give back.
But that's maybe where we need "religion." One needn't go all the way to Schleiermacher's "feeling of absolute dependence" or Otto's "wholly other" to see religion (or practices and ideas we gather under that name) as allowing us to name relationships in which reciprocity doesn't even make sense. It's a little like Aldo Leopold's learning to "think like a mountain," where the predation of wolves is discovered to be necessary to keep deer populations from ravaging forests, but more like Skywoman's cosmogonic dance of gratitude at the sacrifice of muskrat, who, at the cost of his life, brought the little pawful of mud from which our world was made, along with the gratuitous generosity of our fellow nonhuman kin. The dance matters.
Men are not like trees, walking (or not walking). But we live - we are able to live as humans, to dance - with and because of them. Ethics and economics can't begin to frame so profound a relationship.
