Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation

It’s a familiar story in the history of spirituality — St. Boniface carrying his axe and the light of Christianity into the dark forests of eighth-century Germany. He sets his blade to the great oak at Geismar, as anxious watchers hear a rushing sound in the treetops high above. "A few more vigorous blows," says the legend of the saint, "and the great tree cracks and comes toppling down with its own weight, and splits into four huge pieces, leaving a great patch of light in the green leafy vault, through which the sun falls on the triumphant Christian prelate." With this conflict of mythic opposites, the story proclaims the desacralization of nature in pre-Christian Gaul, securing once again the defeat of the natural world through the power of the cross.

This all-too-frequently repeated narrative distorts the actual importance of trees, and of nature generally, in the history of Christian spirituality. For every story about saints who cut down trees in an act of anti-pagan triumphalism, there are two stories of saints living in hollow oaks, singing the holy office along with their arboreal friends, even causing the trees to burst into leaf in the deep midwinter.

If St. Martin of Tours allowed himself to be bound to a stake in the path of a falling sacred pine (though on being cut, of course, it fell in the opposite direction), Saints Gerlach, Bavo and Vulmar were all celebrated for living in hollowed-out trees, St. Victorinus for causing a dead tree to blossom at his death, and St. Hermeland for driving caterpillars from the forest she loved.

Yet Manichean, dualistic strands in Western Christian thought have helped sustain the image of the tree as threatening and idolatrous. After all, eating from the tree of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil caused Adam and Eve’s fall. The tree came to be perceived as the serpent's abode, a sinister nature deity in its own right. Threatening to supplant the distinctive biblical emphases on history, transcendence, and redemption, the tree symbolized the foreign influence of divine powers working through the rhythms and orders of nature. Only as the tree was objectified, turned into a lifeless unspirited being, could nature be "kept in its place" and biblical religion maintained in its universal, unearthly purity.

This pattern of interpretation has been subject to radical critique in recent years, not only from the perspective of ecotheology and environmental ethics, but from revisionist studies of biblical religion itself. Theodore Hiebert's The Yahwist's Landscape (Oxford, 1996), for example, offers a bold rethinking of ancient Israel's religion, questioning the history-vs.-nature thesis that has ruled biblical interpretation. Hiebert shows how the J material in the Pentateuch describes Yahweh's people not simply as desert nomads following God into an open future, but as sedentary farmers working and honoring their land in the Canaanite hill country.

At agricultural centers like Shechem, Hebron, and Beersheba, they set up altars to Yahweh alongside sacred oak trees, giving thanks for harvests of barley, grapes and olives. The Hebrew word for "oak" (elon) is even related to the word for God (el). Antagonism to nature was the farthest thing from the minds of these Israelite highland farmers. They were accustomed to finding God amid their tilling of the soil and longing for rain. They knew that Adam, the first farmer, had been shaped by God's own hands, working the arable soil (the adama, or rich humus) of Eden's plowland. To cut a tree, other than pruning it for its own good or using it to sustain life, would make no sense to them.

This rediscovery of a deep sensitivity to nature in biblical religion, as well as the recognition of the ecological challenge, calls for a new appreciation of trees and other sentient beings. Condemning the sacred groves of Baal and Asherah has kept us too long from validating the fertile agrarian landscape--the world in which Yahweh also is revealed. The psalmist (104:16) describes the Cedars of Lebanon as planted by a divine farmer whose delight in the land seems remarkably akin to Wendell Berry's.

A tree is more than "a rigid pillar in a flood of light," splashes of green that are reducable to measurements of photosynthesis and the hydrostatic pull of xylem tubes. Martin Buber spoke of a tree's thou-ness, of what happens, "if will and grace are joined" as tree and person enter into a relationship and the tree ceases to be an it. (I and Thou). Phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty characterize our perception of the more-than-human world as dynamic, an exchange of intersubjectivities that is often highly participatory. They can speak of a tree as "thinking itself within me," invoking in my body a sensual response that is more than my own perception. Philosopher David Abram explores this mystery in a stunning new book, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996).

Foresters are paying more attention to the responsive character of trees, noticing their high level of cooperation with other life forms, such as fungi. While they do not need each other biologically, trees and fungi are often astoundingly interdependent. Trees also show a remarkable ability to thrive in the most difficult circumstances, sometimes utterly contradicting mechanistic models for predicting tree growth. "Trees of the same species growing in the same soil, climate, and spacing conditions seem to respond individually to the same stimuli...suggesting that there is something else in trees--a selfhood, or subjectivity, or a factor ‘x’ contributing to their infinite variability" (Roger Gottlieb, ed., This Sacred Earth , 1996).

Trees are inexhaustibly unique, as Treebeard testified on behalf of the "tree-shepherds of the forest" in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Our ways of relating to trees are as varied as our ways of relating to people. Jungian psychologist Michael Perlman's ethnographic study of The Power of Trees (1994) reports on how people think and feel about particular trees, relating their accounts to symbolic arboreal interpretations in fairytale and myth. He shows, for example, how the loss (and recovery) of trees after the devastation of Hurricane Andrew gave people in south Florida a symbolic language of grief and hope in dealing with the disaster. Trees are our long-term partners in an environmental

relationship extending far back in our evolutionary history. "Less than two million years ago our australopithecine ancestors spent considerable time living in treetops," says an author of Lessons of the Rainforest (1990). "Before we were human, we were intimate with trees."

Theologically, the Buddhists have vigorously defended the responsiveness of trees and their inclusion in the community of the sacred. In rural Thailand, environmentally-conscious monks have gone so far as to "ordain" particular trees in endangered forests, hoping villagers will refrain from harming stands of teak and mahogany that have been symbolically accepted into the Sangha, the Buddhist monastic order.

The Buddha nature of trees has long been recognized by Japanese Buddhist teachers like Ryogen and Chujin. In its own way, a tree naturally seeks enlightenment. It is always completely and utterly a tree, wrote Chujin in the 12th century. It doesn't try to be anything else, but is perfectly accomplished at being itself (David Kinsley, Ecology and

Religion, 1995). Stephanie Kaza's conversations with trees in her book The Attentive Heart (1993) have grown out of her own Zen practice of shikantaza--sitting in silence before sycamores along overgrown riverbanks or beside ancient bristlecone pines in California's high desert country.

Other sources for honoring the importance of trees also exist in Christian tradition. Simon Schama, in his study of "the verdant cross," describes "a timber history of Christ--born in a wooden stable, mother married to a carpenter, crowned with thorns and crucified on the cross," all of this yielding an astonishing iconography of the sacred tree ( Landscape and Memory , 1995). Other expressions include recurring images of the Jesse tree in medieval art, Bonaventure's Tree of Life, and Hildegard of Bingen’s tribute to the greenness of trees in the Rhine Valley. In Irish Christianity the Celtic tree alphabet or Ogham, using assorted species of trees for spiritual discernment, was carried over by St. Patrick from pagan nature cults.

Yet Christians originally learned of the singing and speaking power of trees, even a tree's emotional life, from Scripture itself. Isaiah, like many of the prophets, spoke of trees clapping their hands for joy, while recognizing also the terror felt by exposed stands of cypress in a high Judean wind (Isa. 55:12; 7:2). Trees, we’re told, have knowledge of Yahweh (Ezek. 17:24), they can grieve and be consoled (Ezek 31:15f), and they readily sing in anticipation of the coming of the King (I Chron. 16:33). Trees speak, of course, in the same way that humans do, through a process of wind passing over cords or membranes like leaves. Anyone who’s ever camped on a windy night under singing larches in Glacier National Park will never doubt the fact.

St. Nectarius, a recently-canonized saint in the Orthodox tradition, taught an entire community of nuns on the island of Egina to recognize the differing songs of trees. One of his confreres could graft one sapling to another with amazing skill by carefully discerning the harmony of their songs. Anyone who listened with deliberate skill, he said, could hear the subtle vibrations of circulating sap.

The recurring image of trees participating in the suffering of Christ on the cross is especially compelling in the history of Christian iconography. Blathmac, an eighth-century Irish poet, wrote that on Good Friday afternoon "a fierce stream of blood boiled until the bark of every tree was red; there was blood throughout the world in the tops of every great wood." This identification with Christ's pain also appears in the image of the Green Man, covered with leaves, found in Europe’s Gothic cathedrals. At the Munster of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, on the edge of the 006600 Forest, the faces of Green Men look down on a 14th-century stone carving of the dead Christ, their features contorted with suffering and grief. Julian of Norwich declared that "all creatures [trees and hazelnuts alike] failed in their natural functions because of sorrow at the time of Christ's death." In each of these ways trees are depicted as members of the Body of Christ, sharing in the groaning of creation, awaiting the redemption for which all of us long (Rom. 8:22).

This forest tradition in Christian symbolism especially makes sense if one also has a history of personal experience with particular trees. I’m amazed at how many students are able to tell stories about their relationships with individual trees. It’s not something they’re accustomed to talking about at a university. One doesn't want to be labeled a druid, a pathetic tree-hugger in the erudite corridors of academe. (We forget that Plato's academy was itself in a grove near Athens.)

Many of the stories my students tell about "their trees" relate to a process of grieving and consoling at some period of crisis in their lives. That’s been my own experience as well. Several years ago I entered into what can only be described as a close friendship with a tall eastern cottonwood living in the park across the street from my house. I call him "Grandfather." We met under peculiar circumstances when a fierce windstorm blew down one of the two great trunks growing out of his seven-foot bole. I was there when the Park Service workers cut into pieces the fallen half of that mammoth, wind-torn tree. Today there’s a huge, gaping wound, over twelve-feet long and six-feet wide, on Grandfather's open side. I touch the scar tissue slowly forming around it even as rot begins to set in from below.

What made our meeting providential was the fact that I, too, was experiencing breakage at the time. My mother had Alzheimer's disease and was dying of cancer, forcing me, an only child, to wrestle with losses I'd been denying for a long time. We shared a lot together, Grandfather and I. He knew pain and relinquishment, and taught me much about relationship, about waiting and letting go, about the detachment that makes love possible.

I still go to him, sometimes with worries about the future or concerns about my children, and he tells me of all the catkins he produces each spring. They’re carried away by the wind, mowed over by tractors, lost so he never has a guarantee of the future, of other trees to carry on what he’s lived for. Through the years he has learned to wait--and to live in blind hope that the wind has carried a single seed to a distant place where his life will go on. He tells me not to worry or rush around as much as I do. "Everything

It’s hard for me to say how we communicate, though Merleau-Ponty comes close when he speaks of the tree seemingly "thinking itself in me." I lean my head against the tree, looking across the distant grass in the early evening light, and listen to the subtle changes that play on my imagination. We connect chiefly by way of metaphor, analogies that allow us to "cross over" (meta-phora) into each other's experience.

We make contact by way of bark, for instance. It is our only means of touching. Yet the bark of an old Cottonwood is rough and deeply furrowed. I have to lean into him carefully, the way porcupines approach each other, slowly and deliberately, from the proper angle. Rough-barked trees, like thick-skinned people, may often seem distant, abrasive, and uncaring. But the bark that serves as a protective wall is also a permeable membrane. There’s a reserved, but deep and honest love underneath it. It isn't accidental that the English word "true" derives from the Old English "treow," meaning "firm and dependable, like a tree."

Relating one's personal experience with trees to the longer tradition of biblical faith may require us to rethink how we define the limits of community. A case can be made for the inclusion of trees in the Communio Sanctorum , the communion of the faithful. If Deuteronomy expresses concern that fruit trees not being harmed in the seige of a city (20:19), if the psalmist speaks repeatedly of a tree "planted in the very house of the Lord" (Ps. 52:10; 92:14), if we’re told that a tree grows in the heart of the New Jerusalem, its leaves meant for the healing of nations (Rev. 22:2), then why not recognize trees as participating with us in the company of the saints_

Theologians from Irenaeus and Isaac the Syrian to Paul Tillich and C. S. Lewis have argued for the inclusion of animals in heaven; I'd like to see the invitation extended to trees as well. It’s more than a whimsical and heuristic proposal. The question of inclusion has occupied the moral center of the ecological movement from its

beginnings. Half a century ago Aldo Leopold complained that "there is as yet no ethic dealing with [the human] relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it." ( Sand County Almanac, 1949) He insisted that all life-forms have to be recognized as intimately interrelated. But how do we understand the character of that relationship, as well as the responsibilities required for maintaining it_

One way of assuring the maintenance of the biosphere is to speak of the legal "rights" of trees, as USC law professor Christopher Stone has done in his book Should Trees Have Standing_ (1974). Similarly, Roderick Nash describes the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 as logical developments in the Western liberal tradition of natural rights ( The Rights of Nature, 1989). Yet this language of "rights" may not be helpful in creating the inclusiveness that will allow us to live with trees in a fully shared community.

Roger Gottlieb criticizes classical liberalism as far too individualistic, too focused on personal identity and ownership, to assist us in confronting the environmental crisis. What’s necessary is to see ourselves as intrinsically a part of that "nature" from which we

so easily distance ourselves. We and the trees are bound together in a symbiotic relationship far deeper than we recognize. As John Seed puts it, we aren't simply individuals defending the rainforest, but "part of the rainforest defending itself." Gottlieb argues for an inclusivist ethic on the basis of ecological values. I’d rather propose it theologically from within the framework of the communion of saints.

The article of the creed pertaining to the Communio Sanctorum traditionally speaks of a fellowship (or koinonia) among God's people--the ones who intercede for one another in prayer and deed. It includes those in heaven (the church triumphant) and those on earth (the church militant), and refers to a "communion in holy things." It focuses on the community of peoples gathered at table with the risen Lord. Theologians since Vatican II have asked how this communion extends beyond the church into the kingdom as a whole. The cosmic Christ of Colossians 1:15 comes to summon all creation to a deeper unity. With leaves in his hair and seedlings in hand, he gathers humpback whales and whooping cranes, passenger pigeons and maidenhair ferns to join with human beings in a common song of praise to God.

The extension of fellowship to ginko trees and mountain ash seems harmless enough. Who would want to exclude the very last member of the species Presidio Manzanita, a single, fragile tree growing today on a bluff in northern California_ But what are the ethical implications of this proposal for including trees in the communion of saints. I’m not arguing for a Sylvan Liberation Movement, abandoning all human uses of trees. That would deny the very interdependency that a common life demands. What I am suggesting is that the following corollaries flow naturally from the acceptance of a principle of inclusivity that welcomes trees into the community of the faithful:

We must recognize trees as sharing an intimate, even sacramental relation with us in the Body of Christ. Without the oxygen they exhale, we would have nothing to breathe. We need them as much as our own lungs. Metaphorically, and ecologically, they are our lungs! The tree-planting Eucharist recently adopted by the Association of African Earthkeeping Churches provides an important expression of this reality

We must extend justice to the creatures that sustain human life, using their products with gratitude and respect. Appreciation for these gifts requires an ethical appraisal of logging practices and reforestation plans, including the rejection of clear-cutting policies and "salvage logging." Particular respect must be give to elder trees in old-growth forests, where species diversity remains at high risk.

We must honor wood, whether cut or uncut. The spirit of Native American wood carvers who ask permission of the tree for the use of its roots or limbs is important to remember. Their ritual prayers to the tree's spirit may take on new meaning in light of the Communio Sanctorum . Shaker cabinetmakers who worked in such a way as to enable wood to respond to its "call" to become a chest or table or chair model the way to honor wood in our offices and homes.

We must attend, finally, to the distribution of gifts within the community of living beings, recognizing the unjust advantages enjoyed for so long by First-World humans. Nature must be acknowledged as "the new poor," to use Sallie McFague's powerful image ( The Body of God, 1993). Yet honoring the entire community means also that unemployed loggers and the families of Amazonian tree-tappers will concern us as much as owls and hardwood forests do. Love must be specific, and attentive to all those in need.

I weigh these thoughts as I walk across the street to the park. It’s late afternoon and a light wind still blows in the tree tops. Grandfather is singing. The Plains Indians considered Cottonwoods sacred because their leaves move so readily in the wind--always praying, like their relatives, the poplars and htmlens.

I think of St. Gudula, a young woman of prayer in eighth-century-Brabant. She loved poplars, praying with them often. On the cold January day after she was buried, the people of the village of Hamme, swore that a poplar tree at the foot of her grave suddenly burst into green leaf. It needed to sing, grieving for itself while also celebrating her passage into the church triumphant. It think I understand, having loved a poplar tree of my own.

I guess that's why I make this request. Open the kingdom for a cottonwood tree. Let the green creation sing at the banquet. Love alone demands it. Charles Peguy once told a story about God's welcoming faithful Christians into heaven. But on meeting them at the gate, God looked over their shoulder, anxiously asking, "Where are the others_"

You didn't leave them behind, did you_" The measure of the authenticity of the communion of Christ is the measurelessness of its power to include. For Christians, loving the natural world isn’t any longer a matter of choice. It’s required by the community in which they live.