The Tree
A Meditation
Advent
2006
Condensed from
Awaiting the Child
The tree of life, in God’s plan, is more than a figure of speech. It is a description of the physical branching out of families, one way through which God’s Word and ways may be passed on. In this context, parenthood is both the most natural of callings and the most humbling privilege. It is important to remember how much God cares about physical life. For all my abstract thinking about images and ideas, my greatest task at the moment is to eat and drink properly to become a fit branch for the flowering of a new life. “It is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual,” Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15: 46.
These images have been mostly spiritual to me through the years, lovely pictures, before I was in a position to contemplate parenthood. When it did become appropriate, my old ways of thinking about “the tree” became livelier. One prays and hopes for “the blessing of children,” but this confirmation of my pregnancy comes as a wave of new possibility, of strength and assurance.
Perhaps it has been easy for me to see this tree imagery only as a metaphor because I have been so far from working with the earth, from cultivating the soil. My husband works in the garden, but I have never enjoyed it. I am amazed when I can keep a house plant blooming! I do love the hymn from the Didache that reminds us that the very bread of Eucharist is from an earthly source, the natural product of the planting, harvesting, growing stalk, broken for us:
As grain once scattered on the hillsides
was in this broken bread made one
So from all lands thy Church be gathered
into thy kingdom by thy Son.
When Jesus taught the mysteries of his kingdom, he so often used the principle
of physical growth and of paradox—as in the parable of the mustard
seed, the smallest of all seeds, a mere pittance. Yet “when it has
grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds
of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matt. 13: 32). The
vision of that end product—the tree filled with birdsong—is
a rich symbol of ongoing life, a motif of joy that brightens the natural
world....
Human life, it seems, is never irrelevant to God’s plan. Instead, we are in the thick of it. We can enter into this design, this story, by accepting the joys and pains of our humanity and submitting them to the good of the kingdom. We can rejoice that participation in its growth is allowed, and cooperate by choosing those things that build and sustain life for our families, our communities, our world.... The branches of the kingdom spread out today, “thick enough to climb”; and in human life we find the joys of communion and pleasures of fulfillment —such as parenthood—grow along with it.
Growth, whether physical or spiritual, is never without some stretching, some pain. I want to reaffirm my choice to submit to this necessity as the weeks and months progress, to understand it as a privilege, part of my participation in the kingdom. Learning about the stages of our child’s growth helps me to feel more connected with the design of the Creator and to appreciate the fact that God sustains and replenishes life in the natural world around us.
The tree has been a symbol of life from the very beginning. But we cannot forget that in the sweep of the continuing story, life and death converged on a tree—the cross of wood that both took Christ’s earthly life and won our redemption into ongoing life. As the seed for the tree begins as a very small entity, yet carries in it all the potential for the flowering of the whole tree, so Advent carries in it the seed of the whole drama of our salvation. The planting, the watering, the tending can be conscious acts in our lives, as we wait for God to give the increase, to bring about his purposes in the world and in our lives—in this place, in this hour.