Written By: Ed Chinn
Narrated By: Kara Lea Kennedy
Louis, an old Basque shepherd, wrote of the night he and Baptista, another shepherd, moved over 200 sheep through a high mountain pass. Suddenly, “…a mountain lion sprung lazily, and likely without threat, across the trail ahead.”
That mere sighting of a lion caused most of the sheep to silently plunge off a 300-foot cliff. “Splitting their bellies, breaking legs and backs … Baptista had to clamber down and cut their throats…”[1]
People often inflict more damage on themselves than any external threat might bring. Seeing something does not always mean do something. Sometimes, we just have to take deep breaths and walk by slow, sure, and deliberate steps.
A tree is a tree, at high noon or at midnight, in rain, drought, city, or country, and whether pigeons or panthers rest on their limbs. They are what they are; they cannot be anything else. Trees never panic; they can’t pull up their roots to run to a better location. By their created purpose, you might say trees take a Benedictine “Vow of Stability.” They stay, stand, and commit.
According to forester and author Peter Wohlleben, trees feel pain (even emitting ultrasonic “screams”), have some capacity for sight, require periods of rest, possess memory, communicate with other trees, defend themselves when attacked, care for their young, build friendships with other trees, pass wisdom down to the next generation, fight to survive, and extend respect to the other members of their community.[2] They do all that, standing in one spot for life.
Thomas Merton spoke of monks as “trees that exist in obscure silence, but by their presence purify the air.”[3]
So, what does all this about sheep and trees mean?
Anyone who ever lived on earth did so in a troubled time and place. Worry, anger, and violence dominate in those times and places. Bodies pile up because “we got to do something.” That’s why God’s question to Job is so timely:
“Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?” (Job 38:12-13)
While we work hard to make our world safer, the sunrise silently and effortlessly stops evil in its tracks just by splashing the light of dawn across the earth. That light takes the edges of the land and pops it like a blanket, sending cockroaches running and thugs and slugs and other slippery things oozing back down into their drainpipes.
As long as the earth remains, threats will spring across our paths. While fear tries to strangle us, the trees stand as cathedrals, always pointing up, and the sun never ceases to rise.
[1] Louis Irigaray and Theodore Taylor. A Shepherd Watches, A Shepherd Sings. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1977
[2] Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees. Vancouver, BC, Greystone Books, 2016
[3] Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey, Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1969
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