March 1 2010
Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree.
I go to a movie perhaps once a year, so, when I saw Avatar my amateurish reaction was one of appreciation. I sympathized with these humanoids, who, with the help of animals, went to great length to protect their tree habitat from being destroyed by ruthless operators.
I may be entirely wrong but I thought I noticed some biblical themes: these creatures loved creation, which I think, is the best way, perhaps the only way, to express our love for God. It’s always been a mystery to me how church-goers claim to love their neighbours, yet have no qualms to despoil the soil, air and water on which their wellbeing depends. At the film’s very end there was a statement that “very few chose to join them”, which made me think of Jesus’ words, “Many are called but few are chosen.”
The entire movie reminded me of The Tree of Life, a recurrent theme in the Bible which starts with The Tree of Life and the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, and ends with the Tree of Life, in Revelation 22:2 with a curious annotation “The leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations.” This suggests to me that trees have miraculous powers, perhaps beyond our understanding. It is well-known that patients who can see trees, recover faster than those who look out on a life- less scenery. Somehow experiencing God’s living world around us makes us live better and longer. Deuteronomy 20 warns us not to kill off trees, even when it might give us an advantage in war.
John the Baptizer compares trees to people. In Matthew 3:10 he says that “every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown in the fire.” Psalm 92: 12 tells us that “The righteous will flourish like a palm tree; they will grow like the cedar of Lebanon”, now all gone, of course.
In the very centre of Scripture is Jesus who died on a Tree. I think it is noteworthy that His blood and flesh was first pounded into a tree before His body-fluids ebbed away into the earth. We tend to limit Jesus’ redemptive act to us, humans alone, but Jesus’ death was necessary to redeem the entire world, including trees, perhaps the most abused single species in creation.
Trees are firmly rooted in the earth from which they derive their food and minerals. They stretch out their branches to heaven as in prayer, a sure sign that this world has been created by God. In Psalm 1 God compared his children to trees, because we too are firmly rooted in the earth.
What is so unique about trees that the Bible begins and ends with them? In many ways trees are like the earth itself. A strange thing about trees is that during its life nearly all of it is dead wood. As a tree grows, it has only a thin skin of living tissue underneath its bark. The wood inside is dead, as is the bark that protects its delicate tissue. More than 97 percent of the tree is dead before it is cut down. In that way a tree is very much like the earth itself. Around the circumference of the earth, on its surface, is also a thin skin of living matter, of which both the trees and we human beings are part. All rocks beneath is and the air above us are dead.
In the same way the earth on which we live, is like the tree. The earth too is a living, breathing organism, now choking on acid rain, running a fever on Global Warming, and angry, very angry, witness the earthquakes and the ever more violent storms. Romans 8 describes the earth as groaning with pain. Only when we perceive the earth as a living entity, can we become aware that we cannot treat it as cruelly as the contract soldiers did in Avatar and much of our industrial system. The earth is alive, because God is alive. If we treat the earth as if it were dead, then essentially we say “God is dead. He has no relevance for me.”
We all know that trees are our lungs: they take the CO2 from the air and breathe out pure oxygen, the very chemical on which our life depends: it requires the oxygen produced by 4500 trees to keep one person in the West alive.
Trees: regard them as your neighbours, love them the same way you love yourself, your family and your friends, hug them and pray for their continuous healthy state.
Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) lives on 50 acres off mostly trees, adjacent to thousands of acres of crown land. Google ‘hielema.ca’ for more writings.