Here are some lessons I learned from a friendly apple tree. I meant to do this episode of The Merry Mystic while sitting in a tree, but it just didn’t work out that way …
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While we’re on the subject: do you know the children’s book The Giving Tree? Depending on your perspective, it’s either a parable about selfless giving, or a sad tale about an abusive relationship. For my part, it bothers me that the boy/man in the story takes everything the tree gives, killing the tree, and never even says thank you. But some people really love this book. What’s your take?
So good to see you back on the internet and assume everything is going well? Sure hope your back heals quickly!
Thanks, Gwen. Sorry about that long hiatus!
Since you asked about the children’s book, The Giving Tree, I have to say it seems bleak. The tree’s self-giving death is not answered by any sign of resurrection among the humans it shades and feeds and houses, just selfish thoughtless consuming and then a wistful remembrance of how wonderful the tree that sheltered us once was.
I’ve been much more heartened by the icons of Jesus, in the Sanctuary at Chimayo here at the pilgrimage site in New Mexico. Yes, they show Jesus nailed to a cross, apparently a symbol of bloody death… but if you look closely, the cross itself is budding, is greening, is coming into bloom. Maybe we could call it The Taking Tree, but that taking is what allows it to viscerally express itself in resurrection.
This Spring, I’ve been thinking a lot about how intertwined giving and receiving, and all forms of life and all forms of death really are. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” [John 12:24] The apple tree doesn’t “give” anything; it offers a fruit in exchange for a journey for its seeds. It offers access to the rootedness of the earth in exchange for our strange restless moving about, and, as a result, we sit in the shade of apple trees (or in apple trees when we haven’t hurt our back or pulled a muscle) in distant lands far far from the apple tree’s original home.