Thanking Trees

During the summer months we worship at a small Congregational church in a nearby town. The congregation worships outside the church building in what they call “the meadow.” It is a shady spot overshadowed by tall pines. These evergreens stand like guardians around a ”peace pole” on which a message of peace is written in several languages. It is a lovely spot for worship.  

I love to worship outdoors. When I served as a pastor, I used every excuse to get my congregation out of the church building and into a natural setting. While here in New Hampshire that included preaching from Pulpit Rock in our corner of the White Mountain National Park, picnics & worship by the pond behind the church, leading worship for fairgoers on an outdoor stage during Columbus Day weekend, baptisms in the lake, a live nativity service at Christmastime, Christmas caroling around the village, Easter sunrise services, and Blessing of the Animals. 

A season never went by without finding an opportunity to get outside the church building to worship. Not only do these outdoor services serve people who might not step inside a church building, but it inspires regular churchgoers to connect the gospel to the world outside the church walls.  

There is something uniquely inspiring about worshipping in a natural setting. God feels closer. God speaks powerfully through Nature, usually more powerfully than through human words. For these reasons I now cherish opportunities for outdoor worship, whether they be at this Congregational church or the Episcopal services held on Church Island during the summer, which we try to attend at least once a year.  

Recently we received some bad news from the Congregational pastor. The four pine trees, which surround the peace pole and shade us during summer worship, are infested with pine borers. They are dying and are going to be removed this month. In her weekly email to the congregation she invited people to “stop by the trees in the next week or two and give them thanks for graceful shade and faithful companionship over many years.” 

So my wife and I did just that. On our way home from the grocery store, we stopped by and thanked the trees. The following day I returned to take a photo of the trees, which I will include here. I thanked the trees for shading us from the summer heat. I thanked them for hosting birds, which would worship with us regularly and occasionally join their voices with ours. The trees inspired us by tirelessly spreading their arms in praise to their Source, which is also our Source.  

They lead us in lifting our hearts to heaven. Trees are so much better at worship than humans are! They are also much better at silence. They are better at teaching and sermonizing eternal truths. Endless homilies are proclaimed wordlessly by these silent sentinels. They are better at living than we are, and they are better at dying. Trees have a lot to teach us if we have ears to hear.  

These four trees have been faithful members of the congregation for many years, and now they are dying. Next spring the congregation will decide what type of trees will be planted in their place. But we all know that it will be decades before the young trees can provide the type of shade that their forebears provided. By that time nearly all (if not all) of the congregation will be gone as well. These old trees will be old memories in historical photographs. 

So, thank you pines! You have performed your ministry well. I miss you already. While I am thinking about it, I also want to thank the trees that sit as cordwood in my backyard, visible to me as I sit on my back porch writing this on my laptop. That firewood will keep me warm this winter. I thank the trees that provided the lumber for my raised flower bed, which I just constructed yesterday. I thank the trees that provided the wood for my old house over two hundred years ago.  

So many trees to be thankful for! So much to be thankful to trees for! Thank you, trees, for the beautiful autumn foliage that is decorating my yard. Thank you for pumping out the oxygen that my lungs breathe in. Thank you for protecting the ground from erosion. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being faithful ambassadors of God. May I do half as well during my earthly pilgrimage.  

Passport Photos Don’t Lie

I just finished the application process to renew my passport online. These days you no longer have to go to the drug store to get a photo taken. You can snap a pic with your cellphone and upload the digital image. So that is what I did. I followed all the directions: white background, no glasses, neutral expression. I did not like the end result. Instead of me, there was an old geezer staring back at me.  

Where did he come from? Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said, “Every man over forty is responsible for his face.” I guess I must be responsible for this face. I compared it to the passport photo taken in 2015. Have I really changed that much in nine years? Where did all that gray hair come from? And all those wrinkles?  

I look different, but I do not feel different from nine years ago. I had supper with my eldest son the other night. He is pushing fifty. (By the way, I feel way too young to have a fifty year old son!) He said he still feels thirty-eight inside. I replied, “So do I!” But my passport photo tells a different story. What am I going to look like when I get my passport renewed in another ten years?  

Last week I took measurements to replace the wood that borders my raised bed flower garden. The present wooden frame was there when we bought the house nearly fourteen years ago. To build a new one I have the option to use PT (pressure treated) or regular lumber. I am going with regular softwood, figuring it would still outlast me.  

The most recent estimate of life expectancy for men in the US is 74.8 years. I will hit that mark before my son turns fifty! To be honest, I consider it a privilege to grow old. Most people in history did not have that privilege. Most people in the world today will not live as long as I have. I have already lived ten years longer than my father, who died at 64. I am grateful for the wrinkles.  

And death does not bother me. Once one knows what death is, there is no need for fear or anxiety. I am talking about seeing what we are before birth and what we are right now. That is what we are after the body takes its last breath. There is a Zen koan: “What is your original face before your parents were born?” That is our eternal identity.  

Jesus said, “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?” A few sentences later he says, “Seek first the kingdom of God, and everything else will work out.” The “Kingdom of God” is Jesus’ term for what Zen calls our original face. So I will not spend any more time pondering the grizzled face on my passport. I will simply go on living with my original face.  

The Languages of God

Pope Francis is in the news ... again. And he is receiving backlash from his conservative critics ... again. During a recent trip to Singapore, he spoke to an interreligious group of young people and made some extemporaneous remarks about interreligious dialogue. He said: 

“Religions are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God.... If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths to God.”   

New York Times columnist David French said that these words “touched off a tempest in Christendom.” I have read several of the tempestuous responses from the Christian press. They all criticize the pontiff for suggesting that there may be another way to God besides Christianity.  

Charles Chaput, archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia wrote: “Not all religions seek the same God, and some religions are both wrong and potentially dangerous, materially and spiritually.” Jeff Mirus of Catholic Culture wrote, “All faiths are not salutary because all religions do not lead to God. Indeed, many religions lead directly to the Devil....” 

This intramural squabble within the Christian Church may sound strange to people in our pluralistic post-Christian culture. Most people are used to a more tolerant attitude toward religion. How many times have I heard open-hearted people say: “All religions are different paths up the same mountain?”  

Yet conservative Christians disagree. They read Christ’s words in the Gospel of John, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me,” and hear only one possible meaning.  They interpret it as Christian hegemony. They do not consider the context of those words in the Fourth Gospel, wherein Christ speaks not as an historical figure but as the Eternal Word “which enlightens every man who comes into the world.”  

There is another fundamental mistake that people make when it comes to the multiplicity of religious faiths in the world. In this regard both Pope Francis and his critics go astray. Religions are not paths to God. There are no paths to God. Religions are not different paths up the same mountain. Identifying religions as paths to God assumes that God is somewhere else and we need to travel to arrive at God. 

God is not somewhere else. God is here now. That is the definition of omnipresence. Any deity that needs to be reached by means of a path is not the omnipresent God. If religions are paths, then they are dead ends. They often serve as barriers to discovering God. They become God substitutes.  

The only true path is the “pathless path.” The only way is the wayless way. God is not found by hiking a trail up a spiritual mountain but by discovering that there is no trail and no mountain. There is only the Divine here now. All we need to do is open our eyes. We need to get out of our own way. All we need is eyes to see and ears to hear.  As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” 

That is why Francis’ description of religions as different languages is a better metaphor than religions being different paths. He said, “Religions are like different languages in order to arrive at God.... There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God.” As I have said, I would disagree with Francis that we “arrive at God.” We have already arrived. We are already in God and God in us.  

Yet I agree that religions function like languages. Just like there are different linguistic languages – French, Arabic, Greek and Hebrew - so there are different religious languages – Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism – that can be used to speak about the Effable. 

Some religious vocabulary may sound very foreign to our parochial ears and minds, but they can point to the same Spiritual Reality we know by other words and names. On the other hand, all religious languages can also be used to point away from God. Examples are the words of Francis’ critics and fundamentalists of all religious traditions.  

The pope’s metaphors may be inexact, but he is pointing to God using human language, which is inadequate for the task. As the Tao Te Ching  says, “The God that can be described is not the true God. The Name that can be spoken is not the Name of God. God is unnamable. Naming God is the beginning of religion.” (The Tao of Christ: A Christian Version of the Tao Te Ching) 

 

Ocean Meditation

This week I spent three days at the Maine coast. We rented a room with a view of the ocean and a lighthouse. The first night we shared a meal with my sister and her husband, who had driven up from the Boston area. It was a beautiful time with warm September weather in the seventies but without all busyness of the summer tourist season.  

The best part of the trip was walking the beach. There is something about being near the ocean that is deeply spiritual. I think it has to do with our evolutionary heritage. While in Maine I was reading a novel entitled The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler and came across this quote:  

"We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives — in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home." 

 

The same is true of us and God. We come from God and return to God. We only survive by carrying God with us all our lives – in our blood, in our cells, in our hearts. God is within us. God is our true home. This is why humans have such a strong religious instinct. Knowing God is like returning home. 

 

I am reminded of a passage from the Upanishads in which a father is teaching his son about the Divine Self, which is the Presence of God within us. 

 

“Please, Father, tell me more about this Self.” 

“Yes, dear one, I will,” the father said. “Place this salt in water and bring it here tomorrow morning.” 

The boy did. ”Where is that salt?” his father asked. 

“I do not see it.” 

“Sip here. How does it taste?” 

“Salty, Father.” 

“And here? And there?” 

“I taste salt everywhere.” 

“It is everywhere, though we see it not. Just so, dear one, the Self is everywhere, Within all things, although we see him not. There is nothing that does not come from him. Of everything he is the inmost Self. He is the truth; he is the Self supreme. You are that, son; you are that.” 

 

Like salt fills the ocean and every cell of my body, so does God fill me. There is no division between God and me. This the experience of oneness that Jesus prayed that we might know as he knows. He knelt in Gethsemane and prayed for us: “I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one — as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me." 

 

Those who do not know this oneness seek to drive a wedge between us and God, as well as between us and each other. Then they offer to bridge the gap with their complex theological and ecclesiastical schemes. But those who have tasted God are not deceived. All we need to do is follow the advice of the psalmist: "Taste and see that the Lord is good."