Meditation Monday - What Happened to The Tree of Life?

AI generated Tree of Life fly Anne on Pixabay

On Sunday I had the rare privilege of preaching at our church. The scripture was Revelation 22 and so I decided to speak about the tree of life which surprisingly is hardly mentioned in the Bible except in the garden of Eden in Genesis and here in Revelation 22. Its presence begins and ends our Bible and it is probably one of the most significant features of creation, yet we rarely think about it, maybe because we were disconnected from it in the expulsion from the garden of Eden and have never fully regained our relationship with it. When I looked for hymns to compliment my sermon, I could find none that really talked about the Tree of Life.

Interestingly, the Tree of Life is a widespread archetype, appearing in numerous religions, mythologies, and folklore. It often symbolizes the connection between different realms (earth, heaven, underworld), the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth, and the interconnectedness of all living things. Even Disney's Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort has a Tree of Life, a 145-foot (44 m) sculpture of a baobab tree with over 8,000 branches of very different sizes and about 102,000 artificial leaves, It features 337 carvings of existing and extinct animal species on its trunk and surrounding roots.

Disneyworld Tree of Life

So back to Revelation 22: 2

On each side of the river of life giving water, stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

First of all it says tree of life not trees of life. That was some amazing tree. I don’t know of any tree today that bears fruit 12 months of the year.

Have you ever wondered what the tree of life in the garden of Eden really looked like? The commonest image we see is of an apple tree, often in a walled garden with a single gate separated from most of the population just as truly as the angel with a flaming sword separated Adam and Eve from the tree of life in Eden .

This image in the new Jerusalem doesn’t sound like an apple tree to me. It is an enormous tree of connectivity, intertwined with all the rest of creation, not separated from it. I wonder if the tree of life was more like the mother trees we increasingly recognize as forest nodes, connecting extensively through mycelial filaments to surrounding trees. As Suzanne Simard explains in her book Finding the Mother Tree, sometimes an ancient mother tree is connected to hundreds of young saplings which they communicate with and help sustain through the fungal network that is part of the forest.

The Wood Wide Web as she calls it is a busy network, where the fungal links serve as pathways for the back-and-forth transport of carbon, water, and nutrients among trees. Among the shifting dynamics of growing trees, the taller, mature elders can shuttle a net amount of resources along a source - sink gradient to shorter, shaded, understory trees.

So lets transpose that to the tree of life in Revelation. Such wonderful imagery of a giant interconnected forest network spreading throughout the city, providing both fruit and healing for everyone. I imagine the original tree of life extended its influence throughout the whole world, its mycelial filaments connecting all of life, providing wisdom, instruction, protection and nutrition to the whole of creation. And because of that, there is fruit in every season - no more seasonal hunger because the crops stored from last year have run out and the new crops are not yet ripe.

The Douglas fir trees here in the Pacific NW were once all part of forests like this. Some of the enormous stumps we find in the remaining forests give us an idea of how big the mother trees of this area must have been and the extent of the forests that once existed helps us understand how important they were. Can you imagine how they connected all the trees of the forest? Now there are a few firs scattered around the neighbourhood, alone and I suspect lonely too, holding knowledge they will never be able to share with saplings and other forest life. It’s no wonder they get diseased. It is in fact surprising they survive without the life teeming around and underneath them, the leaf litter crawling with invertebrates of all kinds, no sterile mulch moonscapes to kill the weeds. No invasive carpets. Just an intact, native ecosystem doing what it’s always done: support life.

We tend to think of trees as individual units, but they are actually part of a large, interconnected community interacting with their own and other species, including forming kin relationships with their genetic relatives. And in their midst both vertebrate and invertebrate animals flourish too.

I can imagine that the tree of life in the garden of Eden was like this, connected not just to other trees in the garden but to all the vegetation that made up the garden, sharing wisdom, encouraging growth and keeping everything healthy. Its world wide fungal net would have helped to nourish all the trees of the earth providing soil for the invertebrates to flourish in and canopies that shaded young saplings and provided habitat for all the animals.

As I mentioned in my post last year, oak forests once covered huge areas of the Northern hemisphere. In California for example, their densely nutritious and neatly packaged, acorns provide a staple food source for deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, and dozens of bird species. Humans, too, have relied on them for over 4,000 years. California’s indigenous people dedicated much of their time to harvesting, processing, storing, and cooking acorns. Acorns were collected in the fall, leached to remove bitter tannins, laid to dry in the sun, and stored in large granary baskets. Upon preparation, they were cracked out of their shells, peeled from the thin, paperlike skin around them, and pounded into a flour. This flour was used to make variations of mush, bread, or soup, which rounded out a nutritious diet of wild onion, carrots, blackberries, and trout. Today, oaks and their life-giving acorns are a sacred connection to history, culture, and sense of place for California’s native communities.

Tragically oak trees, like many large trees are under attack, not just from humans but also from tiny but powerful creatures by the name of Phytophthora. Some postulate that part of the reason for this increasing vulnerability is their isolation. Trees that are meant to be part of a forest community don’t do well alone. Just like us. We are created to be part of community and don’t do well when we are isolated from each other. Social relationships and connections are one of the key factors that improve mental health and help us to age well.

One of the most fascinating giant trees in the world is in Utah. It is a one tree aspen forest called Pando which is believed to be the largest, most dense organism ever found. The clone spreads over 106 acres, consisting of over 40,000 individual trees connected through one root system. The exact age of the clone and its root system is difficult to calculate, but it is estimated to have started at the end of the last ice age. Some of its remaining trees are over 130 years old. Tragically, it too is showing signs of decline. due to a lack of regeneration, along with insects and disease.

The other part of Revelation 22 that catches my attention is “And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” As a doctor, and one who spent much time working with poor and malnourished children, this scripture gives me hope for healing and wholeness for all God’s creation, but I have always tended to think it refers to medicinal herbs when I read it, knowing that so many of our modern medicines have their origins literally in the leaves, roots and flowers of trees and other plants. Now however I am thinking of broader implications of this verse.

Recently I read an article that talked about the explosion of the spread of Lyme disease since the 1970s. The bacteria, the tick vector, and the natural hosts – deer, mice, and birds – were all present before humans arrived in North America. The explosion in human cases, first detected in the 1970s, was fueled by human environmental changes. Development, suburbanization, the introduction of invasive plants, and habitat fragmentation disrupted the native biome. Some species thrived in human-created environments in southern New England - white-tailed deer, white-footed mice, and robins, for instance - and with their success, their infections like Lyme disease, and parasites have also proliferated. Viruses, once kept in check by the native ecosystems, succeeded in this new human-made environment along with their transmission vector, the black-legged tick, which bites a variety of warm-blooded hosts and spreads the infectious wealth around.- the healing power of leaves lies in their biodiversity as well as their medicinal power.

Even beyond that I have been thinking this week of the healing power of leaves of trees when they die. When we add them to our compost piles, allow them to decompose and then add the beautiful rich humus to our gardens, life flourishes from microscopic microbes to earthworms and other invertebrates and together they provide nutrition for the food we eat and for all the vegetation in our world. When we sweep up the autumn leaves and throw them into our yard waste bins rather than spreading them on our gardens, I wonder what life and health we throw out with them. Believe it or not, research suggests that exposure to beneficial soil bacteria, which flourish in compost and the gardens it enriches, can stimulate serotonin production, a neurotransmitter linked to happiness.

The healing power of trees is amazing both in life and in death and I wonder if in our exclusion from the garden of Eden we lost touch with the mother tree of all mother trees - this tree of life from which our health - physical, emotional and spiritual comes.Particularly at the moment it seems that everything possible is being done to cut down more trees, destroy biodiversity and probably exacerbate a range of diseases we have not even thought of yet.

So what does the tree of life look like? I don’t know. Maybe all the trees of our planet are meant to be connected, and interdependent Their rich diversity of shape, form and fruit, the protection they give to flora and fauna everywhere, is meant to provide healing and nourishment throughout the world. An oak tree in Britain, a Douglas Fir in the Pacific NW, a huge red river gum in Australia, a giant breadfruit tree in the Pacific Islands, a mango tree in Southern Asia and yes an apple tree in central Asia. My imagination gets carried away at this point so I thought I would leave you with a little homework

First let’s sit with our eyes closed for a couple of minutes and think about the tree of life . What imagery comes to mind? What can you imagine this huge interconnected tree network would look like?

Now let’s continue our contemplation outside. Is there a large grove of trees or even just one large tree near your home? Plan a visit. Sit in the midst of the trees for a while and read the imagery of the tree of life in both Genesis and Revelation several times. Imagine yourself sitting under God’s giant mother tree, as it pulsates with life and spreads that life out through the fungal filaments that connect it to all aspects of creation. Imagine the wisdom it imparts to all the vegetation of our earth. Imagine the diversity of fruit it makes possible, fruit in every season, abundance all year round. No hunger season, no disease, no isolation. Everything connected with a diversity of form and fruit, nourishing, healing and protecting and providing for each other. What beautiful imagery for us to contemplate today.