The Wisdom Of Trees
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This month we are taking on the gnarly topic of sacrifice. It is a concept that makes many of us uncomfortable, distrustful and a little bit surly, and rightly so. The religious tenet of sacrifice has kept women in abusive relationships, created the justification to wipe out whole nations of people, destroyed landscapes in an equation of loss versus gain that usually involves some form of violence or coercion, and is destructive in its nature.
But today I want to start with trees, trees that say over and over again, “How can I give my love away?” Trees that in essence live out love, and might just share some wisdom about how we can reframe and reconsider sacrifice.
In 1997 a young PhD student, Suzanne Simard, went out into her beloved forests of British Columbia, where she had been born and raised and shaped, to conduct an experiment for her doctoral project. She wanted to see how carbon moved from tree to tree. So she set up an experiment in which she planted a Douglas fir and a paper birch next to one another. She labeled the trees with isotopes, or markers. One tree got C14, and the other C13, so she could track what was being exchanged between the trees. She then went on to shade the trees with little tents throughout the multi-year experiment to create different scenarios to which the trees might respond.
In the first year of the experiment, with the trees growing naturally, the Douglas fir and the paper birch did indeed find connection with one another and exchanged nutrients and carbon in this beautiful reciprocity between species. They used the great underground highway made up of fungi or mushroom networks and their own root systems in this symbiotic communion.
Now, in the second year she tried something different. She shaded the Douglas fir to different degrees with her tents. The more the fir tree was deprived of light and air, the more stressed out the fir became, and the more nutrients and carbon the birch gave to fir tree.
This was the exact opposite of everything science had said so far, that competition was and is the driving force of nature, that evolution depended on survival of the fittest and exploitation is baked into our DNA. Instead, Suzanne was coming to understand the deeply cooperative nature of life, that one species would sacrifice for another’s well-being in some kind of great exchange.
She characterizes this pivotal experiment as elementary in comparison with what we know now, and yet it was such an important awakening in forestry and science. She recounts how people threw rotten eggs at her after her paper was published, because it so upended their notion of the order of things.
In those days no one used the word “communicate” when characterizing the relationship between trees in a forest, but that is exactly what’s going on. Scientists are coming to understand what indigenous folks have been saying for a millennium or more: the trees talk. When you step onto a forest floor there are hundreds of miles of fungal and root networks below your feet, hundreds of miles of communicating software.
- What we call a forest is actually a fraction of what a forest really is. Most of it is below the surface of the ground, far from the human eye.
- Forests have elders, trees who nurture their community of neighbors and young, and provide defense, nutrition, support and structure.
- We know that when a tree is sick or is experiencing some kind of insect infestation it sends out an alarm message to the other trees around it saying: “Protect yourself, I’m sick.” And they do.
- Forests store massive amounts of carbon, and in fact are doing their best to counterbalance the lopsided ratios of greenhouse gases.
This is not what I say as a theologian; this is what scientists are discovering about forests, and indigenous peoples have lived and breathed in their cultural and religious patterns since time immemorial.
The forests are telling us something about love, and sacrifice, and this great exchange that is available to us all if we would but root ourselves in the question How can I give my love away?
I once sat with an old priest as I was trying to figure out my path in ministry. We were talking about living life as a sacrament: making my life a visible sign of an invisible spiritual truth.
He stopped me mid-sentence and asked: “May I?” My journal was sitting open between us, so I could take notes. He took my pen and drew an infinity sign. And then he said, “Sacrament is more than making the spiritual visible. It is more than giving up or sacrificing in order to be spiritually good. There is something in the giving that increases the gift, and comes back on itself in this experience of receiving, an offering that expands the well-being, the life force in the exchange. It is the exact opposite of coercion, or violence or exploitation. It is a way into unitive living.”
I can’t help but think of the forests as I think about that conversation and the concept, the practice, of sacrifice, which means to make holy, a holy exchange. It’s about love.
Love is many things. It is energizing. It is joyful. It is intimate. It is powerful. It is life changing, and it demands sacrifice. Love has costs—that’s the honest truth of it.
I think this is what Jesus was talking about when he was describing the kingdom of heaven, or this idea of right relationship, a network of justice and peace that can emerge in the here and now of human community through love. I imagine him taking us on a walk in a forest, and talking to us about the trees, who know that you love your neighbor—all the hundred thousand species of your neighbors—as an extension of yourself, and when you do that the community is transformed, and health and wholeness of the forest abounds.
If we don’t get our heads around sacrifice I don’t know how we are going to address the huge issues staring us in the face. How are we going to address climate change without coming to grips with love for our planet that costs something? If we don’t get our heads around sacrifice, I don’t know how we as white people will ever get our heads around reparations, by which I mean, as TaNehisi Coates writes in his essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations”:
our collective biography and its consequences as the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely…more than recompense for past injustices, more than a handout, a payoff, hush money or a reluctant bribe…but a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.
Coates is talking about sacrifice in its true form, an offering that comes back on itself and is experienced as unitive living.
I for one, will go to the forest. I will look for a mother tree, and ask her to teach me. I’ll say, “I am open. Would you tell me about the meaning of love, and sacrifice, and the great exchange of which you and I are a part?” And I know she will share her wisdom, because trees talk and they know the true meaning of sacrifice.
As a minister, Ruth proudly serves First Universalist Church of Minneapolis as Minister of Pastoral Care and Worship Architecture. She received a Master of Divinity degree in 2011 from United Theological Seminary in New Brighton and was ordained into the Unitarian Universalist ministry by First Universalist Church. Ruth characterizes her vocation in this way: “I once was a minister in artistry. Now I’m an artist in ministry.”
You can hear some of Ruth’s singing on Spotify: Ruth MacKenzie, Love Like Thathttps://open.spotify.com/artist/27D5KXnwLPpomUDcbsGzkE#_=_
- The Wisdom Of Trees - October 1, 2019
- The Necessity of Discomfort - January 1, 2015
