Spiritual Practices 3 ‘Being in Nature’ Fr. Nicholas
I have had the same spiritual guide for many years. When I look up from my desk at Belair, my guide is always there to inspire. My guide, a tall lemon scented gum. Every year there are leaves to sweep up. There is a season where the tree sheds bark and a new grey sleek coat emerges. In rain, the tree’s perfume is exquisite, wet, earthy lemony and sensual. At flower season, rainbow and musk lorikeets descend for a wild and loud party, liberally blessing cars, and people. Sometimes branches fall in high winds to be cut up and placed in the green bin. The tree must be pruned regularly for health and longevity by expert arborists. This tall lemon scented gum has a curling branch which people stop to admire. This recursive limb is a reminder of the gift of walking. I was born, you see, with turned in feet which as a baby had to be broken, reset, and encased in plaster. Like the mark on the trunk of the tree where a branch has been broken, I too have been broken and reset and the scar and sometimes aching feet remind me of that gift. My spiritual guide has a language moving with the wind. This tree that shares my space is beautiful.
I love to learn about trees and their mysterious world. I am entranced by their ability to communicate with each other, and with the reciprocal relationship that many have with other beings. Trees are a wonderful mystery. They live in a reciprocal relationship with us, along with other plant life, they give oxygen to the planet, cooling our streets, breaking the force of the wind and so much more. Trees provide the paper on which our Bibles are printed and we can look up to see wooden beams sheltering us in church. Yet we are wise to treat trees with respect and wisdom if we are to co-exist with them and flourish with us. I will miss my spiritual guide when in a month or two we sell the house and I hope the new owners care and appreciate the beauty of this tree.
In this season of Lent, we rest our gaze on the tree of the cross. This tree holds the son of a carpenter who spoke of trees and vines. This is a tree that is dead and it cradles the dead Jesus. His breath has stopped, the branches of his ribs have ceased to move. If we were able to see our own lungs they would seem like branches and leaves. We receive and we give, living in reciprocity with trees and other sentient life. Yet the winter we know gives way to spring as leaves appear on deciduous trees, and as a lemon scented gum sloughs off its old bark, the joy of the resurrection brings the fruit of faith, hope and love.
Dead trees as we know often provide habitat for all kinds of native animals and birds and as they fall, they replenish and nurture the living soil.
To contemplate a tree invites us to wonder and thanksgiving and to penitence for the madness that stole from the tree of good and evil and took a hammer and nails to the living tree of life planted at the crossroads as a sign of shame and humiliation, failure, and violence.
Placed in the earth Jesus was restored and renewed. In the resurrection creation is completed and begins its return to harmony its true destiny.
To contemplate a tree invites us to humility. The very word comes from the word humus used for rich soil. To contemplate a tree invites us to a recognition that we as human beings participate in an interdependent web of being. My life, your life is a miracle.
The tree of the cross as the hymn says ‘above all other, one and only noble tree’ calls us to wake up, be made anew and in our inner beings grow beyond the stunted damaged selves which our society forces us to be. So, as a Lenten discipline let us contemplate a tree and ask it to speak to us. Not in a literal way of course, but as an invitation to wonder. Let your lungs breathe opening to the sacrament of the air which the tree offers back to you. See Jesus in that tree and hear his call to life in the here and now.
‘God help us to rise up from our struggle.
Like a tree rises from the soil.
Our roots reaching down to our trouble.
Our rich dark dirt of existence.
Finding nourishment deeply
And holding us firmly.
Always connected.
Growing upwards and into the sun.
Amen’
(p 58 Michael Leunig When I talk to you)
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