Enlarging the Canopy
[Powers, Richard, The Overstory (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018 [Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2019]).]
[“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree. . . .Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree” (from “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer [1886-1918]).]
O Lover,
In this tree-signaled transitional season of “Autumn” I have just completed reading the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and a repeated short-lister on both sides of the Atlantic, he introduces us to nine disparate young adults in the recent past whose variously expressed concerns regarding disappearing virgin forests in the United States occasion their improbable convergence, secretive collaboration, and then dispersion. Beyond constituting a frontal assault on the notion of trees as merely decorative or fodder for the insatiable maw of consumption, and thus self-evidently dispensable, the converging and interwoven journeys of the nine raise towering spirituality questions in the emerging face of catastrophe. Through the trees the author subtly invites us to look yet again at . . . everything.
This arbored novel confronted me repeatedly. Granted, I have never been dubbed or behaved as either a clear-cutter or a tree-hugger. But as a Minnesota boy I did craft tree-houses in summer around which fantasies unfolded in the windbreak shielding family and animals from greater cold in winter. I recall how my patience was overmatched by that of a cottonwood seedling which I planted and watered, albeit briefly. I remember being dumbfounded upon first visiting Sequoia National Park. My olfactory sense can still call up the copse of pines surrounding our home in Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah, my memory retrieve the graceful cedars of Lebanon.
Trees appear often in biblical iconography. They were associated with sacred burial and cultic sites in numerous books of the Hebrew canon. For Christians both intro and outro of scripture include the “tree of life” (Gen 2:9; Apoc 22:2), the latter adding the words “the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Luke (Acts 5:30; 10:39), Paul (Gal 3:13), and Peter (I,2:24) all allude to the wooden cross of the Christ’s passion as “tree.” In the subsequent tradition the arboreal image becomes even more multifaceted: spiritual stability and strength, the constant of thriving growth rather than staticity, and Your viríditas (“greening”) characterizing the cosmic tree (Hildegard).
However, O Lover, trees in Powers’s book impacted me not so much as iconic archetypes as free-standing miracles in their own right, as elders among Your finite beloveds possessing astonishing biosystems, communication capabilities, fruitfulness, and a propensity for collaborative complementarity, this in addition to their multifaceted utility and beauty. Powers deepened my conscientization regarding the planet’s suicidal bent to clear-cutting and monetizing these creatures, some thousands of years old, to feed a vacuous addiction to more-ness. One of his characters declares that the only justification for cutting down a tree is the derivation of a miracle greater than that tree already is.
But even more specifically, Powers’s book served to accentuate the issue of how I as a person of faith in You and Your converging Mystérium (Eph 1:10) hold the entirety of the botanical sphere. Is not the tree a participant in the ta pánta (“all things”) category both strewn through Paul’s writings and groaning (too) in anticipation of its salvation (Rom 8:18-22)? Does not the killing of the few remaining majestic Redwood and Sequoia organisms vastly older than the Christ story, this in the interests of more paneling, constitute grotesque desecration? Is there a clearer example of self-immolative human behavior than our utilitarian and profoundly short-sighted behavior with trees, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific Northwest? If the “flesh” in which You were/are incarnating in the Christ includes trees, distant relatives with whom we humans share some DNA, how can we be so dismissive of their destruction? How can our rapaciousness toward the arboreal be reconciled with the apokatástasis (“restoration of all things” [Acts 3:21]) strand in the Christ tradition?
In short, O Viríditas Itself, must not the canopy of Your Mystérium Dream be expanded to include the trees?
