Sawdust and Soul. John W. de Gruchy

      Platbos reminded me that forests are the stuff of fairy tales and legends. In olden times, they were the boundaries between villages, and most villagers seldom ventured alone into their foreboding darkness. They were places where danger lurked, strange things happened, monsters hid, aliens dwelt, and big bad wolves ate straying boys and girls. It was not impossible, as C. S. Lewis once said, that an ogre might live less than an hour away! But Platbos is not a place to fear, it is a place to be renewed, to regain a sense of proportion, a place to discover oneself and share with others your deepest thoughts. You can walk through its shaded paths, sit under its trees, marvel at its shapes and forms, and sometimes on a moonlit night you might even see a shy leopard seeking its prey, or a striped genet clinging to the branches of a stinkwood tree.

      It is true that the Old Testament prophets sometimes identified enchanted forests or sacred groves with idolatry, superstition, and sorcery, yet for Ezekiel and some of the psalmists, trees also provided metaphors for the renewal of life, anticipating the day when the trees of the forest would clap their hands and sing for joy (Ps 96:12). Or as St. Paul puts it, the whole creation groans in expectation of a humanity that has come to its senses and begun to care for it with renewed love and energy (Rom 8:22).

      We are fortunate to be living in an age today when people across the globe are seeking to reclaim the enchanted forests that are so necessary for life in its fullness, protesting against the greed that destroys the trees that renew the very air we breathe. For we have come to see that if you rid the world of its enchanted forests and all that they symbolize as well, you rid it of the essences of life. So it is not surprising that there is a hankering for places of enchantment to which we can retreat in search of solitude and the renewing of soul. This is not naive romanticism; it is the recognition that we need such places and spaces for the sake of retaining our humanity and renewing our souls. A walk in an enchanted forest can lead us deeper into the mystery of the incarnate God through whom “all things have been created,” and “in [whom] all things hold together.” Which reminds me of an intriguing verse in the Gospel of Thomas, the most important of the apocryphal gospels from the first centuries of Christianity. It is a saying of Jesus: “Raise the stone, and there you will find me; cleave the wood, and there I am” (77). It was probably excluded from the New Testament because it seemed to support the idea that everything is God, what we call pantheism. It is also a reminder that the Spirit of God is the energy that pervades and gives life to the whole of creation. After all, the whole earth is the Lord’s and everything in it is a sacrament of God’s beauty and love. No wonder the trees of the forest clap their hands and sing for joy.

      * * *

      Wounded Whole

      The Platbos story resonates a great deal with me, John, because you might say I live in an almost mythical forest, right on the edge of the Pisgah National Forest, abutting the Shining Rock Wilderness. We live in the presence of one of the largest tulip poplar trees in the state of North Carolina. Almost twenty feet around at its base, reaching up over a hundred feet and an equal span across, it sings out the changing seasons on our mountainside. We are not its owners. We are only temporary guardians. Our arborist guesses that its age is over two hundred and fifty years—older than the US Constitution. Cherokee ancestors hunted underneath it, an orchard stretched beneath it until only a few years ago. Until we built our driveway a small spring emerged beneath it. There is a hollow at its base and we surmise it escaped the lumberjacks because of the damage caused by a thunderbolt long ago.

      Many of us have some important trees in our lives. They are part of our planet’s lungs, source of the very air we breathe. And, of course, they are festooned with religious meanings, from the tree of Eden’s paradise to the tree of Revelation’s new heaven and new earth. As you said, the more we realize our symbiosis with trees, the more we can be energized to bring our life back in balance with its very source.

      The tree became a symbol of one of the first steps I took toward trying to get more balance in my own life. It was 1999. I was asked to give a brief talk at my seminary about faith, healing, and spirituality—not exactly my field—but I accepted. At the time, as I looked out my study window at the tulip poplar, my feet were hurting and my back was all knotted up like a twisted cedar that’s been in the wind too long. I really hurt, so I couldn’t split those locust logs or work on the stone retaining wall I had so carefully designed during faculty meetings.

      Having used up all my Calvinist stoicism I finally called my doctor. He told me I had plantar fasciitis. All I could think is that my feet must have acquired some fascist tendencies. Furthermore, he intoned, standing around in Atlanta lecturing when I should have been lying under the tulip poplar had thrown my back out. He said he’d send me an instructional brochure. And try not to walk too much.

      Immediately people started crawling out of the woodwork like Job’s friends—telling their stories, sharing their remedies, exercises, names of massage therapists and recipes for herbal remedies, some of them containing ginseng or bourbon. The massage therapist was really great. She wore bib overalls, which made me feel comfortable. Her hands were very strong but I trusted her.