The Two Trees

 Lent is more than half over. We are approaching Holy Week. The trees are starting to burst with buds. So, let’s reflect on trees…two of them.

 The first is made of two crossbeams. It’s called the cross. It’s an instrument of execution, one of the most painful invented by humans. The victim slowly bleeds to death while suffocating. The weight of the torso so pulls the body downward that the lungs cannot fill with air.

 Why are we reflecting on such a hideous image? Because our God, in the person of the Word-in-our-flesh, chose deliberately to suffer death this way. Not by firing squad, not by beheading.

 Now why, you say, would the God of heaven and earth chose such a thing? Because history reveals that we do the most dastardly things to one another. This God-who-is-unconditional-love, is making a statement. This God has a final Word for us: “No matter what you do to one another, no matter how full of despair you are, no matter… I will be there loving you, and my love will win over all the sin you can invent.”

 It all began in a garden. There were two trees. One was the Tree of Life, the other the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God said not to eat of the fruit…maybe it was not ripe? It would ‘kill’ them. They were tempted and ate it anyway. Their relationship with God died, and they hid feeling the nakedness of themselves without the garment of God’s affection. All of history unfolded, wracked with sorrow, evil, abuse, war, and despair. The ‘fruit’ had indeed poisoned humans.

 So God started over with an antidote. There was a garden. There was a second tree in the form of a cross. God’s beloved Word was the fruit on this tree. The Word was hushed to whispers, so his Body spoke…blood pouring out. Now we are told, “Take and eat…this is my Body given for you…I am the healing of your poison…I am the Life to wipe away your death…” The cross is Love’s answer to our sin. Catherine of Siena heard God saying it this way in her Dialogue:

 Imagine a circle traced on the ground,

and in its center a tree sprouting…

Think of the soul as a tree made for love and living only by love….

The circle in which this tree’s root, the soul’s love, must grow

is true knowledge of herself, knowledge that is joined to me,

who like the circle have either beginning nor end.

 

Dialogue, 10.