Christmas is just three weeks away. Silver bells ring on city sidewalks, sleighbells jingle in lanes. Coloured lights brighten the long dark nights.

            And indoors, Christmas trees light up.

            Our family used to go out and cut a tree. About 11 years ago, for various reasons, we switched to an artificial tree.

            I figure 11 trees are still alive today, that wouldn't be otherwise.

            “So what?” you scoff. Pines and firs on a Christmas tree farm were never intended to grow to maturity. They were grown to be cut down, weren't they?

            Maybe. But like us, they're living things.

            Trees are, in fact, the oldest living things on the planet. A Bristlecone pine at a deliberately undisclosed location in California is supposed to be over 5,000 years old. It started growing before Egyptians built pyramids.

            Fortunately, no one cut Christmas trees back then.

            Trees are also the largest living things. Individual trees, like the redwoods in California, the Douglas firs in B.C.'s old-growth forests, are huge. But the biggest living thing on the planet is probably the multiple stems of a single Quaking Aspen in Utah that covers 106 acres and weighs an estimated 6,000 metric tonnes.

Sacred trees

            The ancient Druids had sacred groves. I suggest that every tree should be considered sacred.

            Because we owe our existence to trees.

            At one point in the planet's history, our atmosphere contained too little free oxygen for animals to survive. But plants created oxygen as a waste product, thus enabling us oxygen-breathers to evolve to what we are today.

            As the largest plants, trees did most of the work.

            When my daughter was about 12, I gave her a small book of poems -- short, mostly tongue-in-cheek -- as a Christmas present. I hoped they would both entertain her and encourage her to see familiar things with different eyes.

            In one of those poems, I called trees the stitches that held earth and sky together. If it weren't for trees, I suggested, the sky would go flying off and leave us with nothing to breathe.

Linking earth and sky

            It’s not such a silly idea.

            Visually, a slim trunk ties together roots and branches. Both of which divide and spread to grab hold of as much soil and air as possible. Their structure resembles the capillaries of human circulatory systems, the bronchioles and alveoli of human lungs.

            If it weren't for trees, the sky would not fly off. But we wouldn't have air our lungs could use.

            Our civilization, tragically, see trees mainly as a resource to be cut down, harvested, cut up for lumber or firewood. We fail to acknowledge that trees are the most efficient carbon-sinks we have, far surpassing human technologies.

            That's how we got coal, the original fossil fuel. Coal is almost pure carbon, the remains of trees that fell in a forest long before anyone heard the sound of their falling.

            But every year, we humans cut down about 15 billion more trees. Since that Bristlecone pine was a seedling, the planet has lost one-third of its trees. We clear land for farming. We bulldoze trees for housing developments. We clear-cut hillsides.

            Christmas is about the only time in the year that we give trees a sacramental role in our lives.

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Copyright © 2016 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.

                  To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca

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ANNOUNCEMENT!

I have a webpage again! Wahooo! Wayne Irwin, of ChurchWebCanada <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>managed to salvage and rebuild a website for me. All current columns are now pasted into it, along with about four years worth of archived columns. More archives will be added, as I find time. If your email version of my columns comes through garbled, for any reason, or if you lose a column, you can now go to the web page and read it there.

YOUR TURN

I’ll start this week’s correspondence with something like a Christmas card of good wishes from Mervyn Flecknoe in England: “I know that it is sometimes lonely, penning a column in the silence of the keyboard, not really knowing who is going to read your outpoured and beautifully crafted wisdom. So, this is just a line that you can read anytime you feel like that. I read every one of your pieces and, usually, you send my mind into a realm of reflection that I have rarely, if ever, visited. I am so grateful for your fluency, your eclectic appreciation of the world, and your ethical stance that cheers me every time. Your writing is very important to me, and I guess to many others too.  I have been a preacher now for 50 years, writing the bones of a sermon each week which, of course, means I don't get to hear many. Your reflections often fill my soul with the sustenance I otherwise lack. So, thank you most sincerely.”

Okay, now to the responses to last week’s column about the importance of stories.

Cliff Boldt was terse, as usual: “Boy, you nailed it with this one. Stories, parables, anecdotes.  All the same by different names.  And they connect with people.”

Maggie Rogers seconded his thoughts: “Thank you for reminding us that stories are so important.  I grew up with a story-teller mother, so I know the value of a good story to teach with.  I wish more of the literal-minded people where I live would understand that the story is what is important!  The story I hear most loudly when I read the Bible is of encouragement and love.  I don't think that is always what is heard in church doctrines.”

Judy Lochhead moved us into theology: “Your column parallels my recent thinking. While the stories [in the Bible] are good ones, it is now 2 millennia since Jesus arrival and perhaps it is time for a ‘newer’ testament to be written.

               “I think of the Gretta Vospers who are challenging the theology and indeed the hierarchy of the church and ‘irritating it into the next century’.  Jesus did exactly this in his time, and how difficult it was for the church to rationalize the radical thinking of the new philosophy. 

               “What if God, whatever God is, is leading this new thinking, new theology and if so, who are we to stifle the reformation?  Only through the stories that we pass on will there be an understanding of the historical impact of how we handle the challenges that we face as the church today.  Are we willing to throw the new thinkers under a bus, or are we willing to be open to possibilities?

               “I find myself in a sort of wilderness as I can no longer accept a triune God as a "guy in the sky", however, I cannot also call myself atheist, as I do believe that perhaps God is up to something.  When professed athiests and children report out of body experiences, then there has to be something going on that is still beyond the grasp of our understanding.”

Isabel Gibson commented, “Years ago, as I was getting into business writing, I toyed with the idea of doing an executive summary of the Bible.  You can imagine the sort of thing: ‘Leviticus: Outdated laws.  Ignore.’ But the stories -- they don't summarize so well.  And that's a good thing.”

Laurna Tallman didn’t agree with my approach to the Bible: “I would reply that the Bible remains our primer, a fundamental source of knowledge about God because it begins at the beginning of human efforts to understand that collection of mysteries subsumed under "God did," "God saw," and "God said." The Bible, in and of itself, is an artifact of the human mind worthy of study. Bible stories provide the yardstick by which we measure our more complex discoveries about the Creation because they reflect human mental processes that are the same today as they were when the stories were written. The Bible is never in error in the sense that it is a realistic account of events according to the mental constructs of various kinds of reporters--scribes, poets, playwrights, historians, prophets, disciples--about every class and type of person over an interval of perhaps 6,000 years of human history.

            “One of the serious mistakes made by supposedly rational people during the few hundred years during which "science" has been the primary mode for describing reality has been to reject that Biblical narrative rather than continuing to examine it for the truths it holds…

            “For me, the Bible was not only a field for study, it was a guide. By following essential Biblical precepts, such as prayer, and by learning from Bible stories how to hear and respond to the "inner voice" of God's leading, and by attempting to emulate the persistence, faith, and compassion of Jesus and His followers, I persevered in seeking answers to our son's severe mental illness until I came at last to scientific knowledge that illuminates the causes of human behaviour and offers healing on a colossal scale to humans with aberrant behaviour. I learned that music heals mental illness.

            “While I do not advertise my teaching under the Christian rubric, every so often a client is a Christian and we can communicate in terms of our common understanding of the Biblical narrative. Those stories add an important dimension of longitudinal "testing" of the principles of behaviour under discussion. The Bible provides useful clues to the value of music for healing mental illness as well as for enhancing health. If those stories had been taken seriously sooner, terrible suffering could have been avoided.”

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PSALM PARAPHRASES

The lectionary offers a choice again, for this third Sunday of Advent – Psalm 146:5-10, or Mary’s Magnificat in Luke. Since this is the season of preparing for the birth of Jesus, I’m going to go with the song that perhaps belongs to every first-time mother.

My body bulges with new life;
the joy of it shines in my face.

For so long I have longed for this child.

But now everyone smiles at me; they congratulate me;
I'm so happy!

Now I know that prayers can be answered;

now I know that the deepest longings of the heart can take flesh.

I will be the best mother there ever was!
You don't have to be rich or famous to nurture new life;
you don't need big houses or expensive nannies--
you need love.

The most important person in the world lives inside me;
my unborn child matters more than prime ministers or presidents.

I feed my child with my own life blood;
I will nurse it with the milk of my own body.
No one else in all the world, no matter how rich or powerful, enjoys that privilege.

I care for my child the way I know God cares for me.

As the child lives in my womb, so I live in the womb of God.

For paraphrases of most of the psalms used by the Revised Common Lectionary, you can order my book Everyday Psalms from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.

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YOU SCRATCH MY BACK…

•        Ralph Milton has a new project, called Sing Hallelujah -- the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca

•        Isabel Gibson's thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com

•        Wayne Irwin's "Churchweb Canada," an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>

•        Alva Wood's satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not particularly religious, but they are fun; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.

•        Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” – ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at twatson@sentex.net

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TECHNICAL STUFF

If you want to comment on something, send a message directly to me, jimt@quixotic.ca.

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                  I’m delighted to say that my webpage is up and running again – thanks to Wayne Irwin and ChurchWebCanada. You can now access current columns and about four years of archives at http://quixotic.ca

                  I write a second column each Sunday called Sharp Edges, which tends to be somewhat more cutting about social and justice issues. To sign up for Sharp Edges, write to me directly, jimt@quixotic.ca, or send a note to sharpedges-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca

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