A Simple Thing

Dear Friend,

The leaf returned this morning. A different leaf but also the same leaf, because…well, you already know why.

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Yesterday a friend and I walked these same woods together and he told me the story of a trip he made to Mongolia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is how I remember it:

My friend met a man who, after living for years in a place that no one could speak their love for God out loud, was at long last able to let his faith out to play in the neighborhood streets - with all the others. Can you imagine what it must have been like that day? Like watching children in the spring after a long, cold, and dark winter. Imagine, if you can, the joy. The laughter. The games of chase, and the long, long, long embraces of friends remembering one another face-to-face. At last.

My friend asked the man how his faith had remained so healthy, vibrant - being locked away, as it had been, for so many years,  in the basement. The Mongolian man, through an interpreter, smiled and said that he and his faith would sneak out of the house before the sunrise each morning to walk in the woods, praying together. He almost certainly didn’t use the term, but I think of them as forest bathing, allowing the woods to wash the darkness and the fear off of them, and coming out of the woods each day, the sun having risen along the way,  seeing more  clearly the wonder of creation, even if there was no one else to share it with. Having their lenses wiped clean was enough.

Beholding was enough.

“And on these walks,” the man added, “I would preach to the forest.”

“Preach to the forest?” my friend asked. “How would you do that?”

His new friend paused, and his words finally made their way back through the interpreter. 

“I would speak to the trees and the birds and the animals, and I would say, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry - it’s going to be okay. There is a redeemer coming.’” 

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I set out to walk this morning, and it wasn’t long before the leaf came to greet me. I was so excited to find her and to share this little bit of wisdom with her. To let her know that she had nothing to fear. To assure her that all of it was going to be all right and all we had to do was to wait for the coming redeemer. To be still and to wait. As the fireflies and honeybees and opossums and chickadees wait, and as all creation waits.

She sat patiently with me, listening to every word, nodding at just the right times, paraphrasing, clarifying, and restating. Asking open-ended questions and being a good and waitful friend. 

But I didn’t get the reaction I had hoped for. Nor the response I had expected. There was no look of relief or amazement in her brown, wrinkled face. Only a look of kindness, and perhaps the look of gentle knowing that I had finally heard what she had been whispering to me all along.

Oremus,

Chris

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When I Am Among the Trees

by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

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