Sermons

READING – from “Introduction: Connections” by Suzanne Simard excerpts from Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Nothing lives on our planet without death and decay. From this decay springs new life, and from this birth will come new death. The forest itself is part of much larger cycles, the building of soil and migration of species and circulation of oceans. The source of clean air and pure water and good food. There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature – its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity. Working to solve the mysteries of what made the forests tick, and how they are linked to the earth and fire and water, made me a scientist. I watched the forest, and I listened. The trees soon revealed startling secrets. I discovered that they are in a web of interdependence, linked by a system of underground channels, where they perceive and connect and relate with an ancient intricacy and wisdom that can no longer be denied.

In this search for the truth, the trees have shown me their perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations. Slowly I have come to understand that the trees were relaying back and forth through a cryptic underground fungal network. When I followed the clandestine path of the conversations, I learned that this network is pervasive through the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links. A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings.

The old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes. The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin. The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children. They are The Mother Trees. Mother Trees – the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience – die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do. With each new revelation, I am more deeply embedded in the forest. The scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: the forest is wired for wisdom sentience, and healing. The question is not how we can save the trees. The question is how the trees might save us.

SERMON

Good morning, and Happy Mothers’ Day to each of you who is a mother and to each who has or ever had a mother – so that’s all of us! I have chosen to share with you this morning a concept from a book that has recently made a great impression on me, Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree with the subtitle Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

In case you don’t know me, my name is Jenny Reece, and I am a retired Episcopal priest – retired, but still active, preaching often for example, at Trinity Episcopal Parish here in Castine. Also in my retirement I serve on the Episcopal Diocese of Maine’s Climate Justice Council, leading the efforts of Episcopalians all over the State of Maine to equip ourselves and our congregations to be good stewards of God’s creation. I am convinced that the most pressing call from God in our time is to learn to take care of planet earth, Mother earth as we can call her, before it is too late.

I find in Suzanne Simard’s scientific work and her words about it a great deal of hope: We can learn, even at this late date, from the natural world, and especially from trees.

Trees are so familiar to us, but what do we know of them, really. There’s a saying about not being able to see the forest for the trees – in other words, the tendency to focus on the nearby and the individual instead of being able to see the whole picture. But I think it works the other way, too. We haven’t seen trees for the forest. That is, we haven’t seen and appreciated the trees near us or to really look at them because they all fall under the general term “the trees.” But they are as diverse, as varied, as quirky, and as complex as any other community.

When is the last time you went outside and leant your hand against the bark of a tree and felt its life, probably older than yours by many years, running strongly through it? When is the last time you went out and thanked a tree for its protection, for its breath that helps you breathe, for its fruit, for its very being. If nothing else comes out to you from what I say today, I hope it will be this one act. Go and talk to a tree. Hug a tree, as they say. Better still, go listen to a tree. What is it telling you?

One way we listen to the trees per Suzanne Simard and others: scientific investigation. It is amazing to me that only in the last twenty years scientists have been discovering that trees have a communication system and a common life that rivals any society of animals or humans. But for millennia before our age, trees have been to humans a reality of survival and an image of nurture, growth, strength, and wisdom.

The tree of life. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil – these are some of the images of trees from the very first pages of the Bible – and the very last pages too, as John the prophet of Patmos talks of the tree of life again whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. Trees abound throughout the biblical literature. In the very first Psalm in the book of psalms, people who love and listen to God are described as “like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper.” In Psalm 52, David says, in contrast to those who put their trust in power and wealth, “But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God for ever and ever” and Psalm 92 echos it with this: “The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God. In old age they still produce fruit; they are always green and full of sap.” Proverbs: “Wisdom is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy.”

This is what the section read today from Ecclesiasticus takes up and elaborates. Ecclesiasticus perhaps is not a book of the Bible that is familiar to you. It is one of the books we call Apocryphal or deuteron-canonical, accepted as Scripture by the Catholic Church but held as not part of the canonical bible by Jews and Protestants. The books of the apocrypha are often examples of what we call Wisdom literature – the biblical Book of Proverbs, and many of the Psalms too are examples of this kind of writing. Collections of wise sayings and precepts handed down to the generations. Old Wives tales you could say, the wisdom of the mothers. Ecclesiasticus is one of the few Biblical books we actually know who the author is. His name is Jesus. No, not that Jesus, Jes Ben Sira who lived in Palestine around 180 years before the birth of the other Jesus. Ben Sira was probably a scribe well versed in Jewish law and custom, writing this in Hebrew in the Wisdom tradition, filling his book with practical and moral rules and exhortations, frequently arranged according to subject matter – e.g., hypocrisy, generosity, filial respect. At the heart of his book is a long discourse spoken by Wisdom. Wisdom is presented by him in the same way as in Proverbs and elsewhere, personified as a woman: Sophia, or Lady Wisdom, and as part of God, with God from the beginning, active in creation and speaking through the natural world.

Wisdom is the Mother tree at the heart of our forest. We need to find her. We have been given all kins of ways to make this search. We have been given science. Scientific inquiry is of utmost importance in our search for Wisdom. But it isn’t necessarily equated with wisdom. The discovery of nuclear fission is one of so many scientific advances, along with the internal combustion engine, and so many other, that have led us to folly and destruction and not to wisdom.

So where does wisdom lie? How do we find it? By connecting to the Mother Tree. That is by connecting with your own ancestral roots and the wisdom that has come through your family from mother to son, from father to daughter. By connecting with your cultural roots, but not confining yourself to them – indeed like the trees, spread their roots and communicate through the network of fungi everywhere through the forest, so must we seek out other cultures and other ways of being and learn through them. But most of all, I would say, wisdom comes from acknowledging that beyond and behind all trees and forests, all human knowing and human societal efforts, there is another reality, the love of God. All creativity, all new life, all growth, all power, ultimately comes from Love, and God is love. So my friends, seek God. Like Be Sira, look at the world around you and enjoy the multiplicity of the trees and their heady aromas, all the things our senses bring to us, attend to the wisdom of music and art, and along with science we will com to hear the voice of the Mother Tree deep in our veins calling us to peace and enabling us to make a new beginning and a new world even in these dark and dangerous times.

In conclusion, I must say that as an Episcopalian it has been odd for me to use as a text for a sermon something other than a passage from the gospel, on the wisdom taken from the life, death, resurrection and teachings of Jesus Christ. I am very Christ centered, but I come here to you knowing that not all of you are, so I wanted to be sensitive to that.

But as it is Mother’s Day, I must honor my own mother, from whose wisdom and passion I learned so much of what I know and preach and teach. She too was a very Christ-centered woman of faith – something very beautiful that we shared to her last breath and beyond.

So I want to end by sharing something from her with you today, and that is her favorite carol. It’s an old song, recently given new music by an English composer, Elizabeth Poston, but it’s the words I want to share with you today. It’s called Christ the apple tree. In it, Jesus is compared with a fruiting apple tree – a tree which reminds us of the story of Genesis with the tree of life, the tree of wisdom, which the first earthlings at from, and reminds us of the Wisdom Ben Sira voiced in the Mother Tree. This is how it goes:

The tree of life my soul hath seen
Laden with fruit and always green
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the Apple Tree.

His beauty doth all things excel
By faith I know but ne’er can tell
The glory which I now can see
In Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.

For happiness I long have sought
And pleasure dearly I have bought
I missed of all but now I see
‘Tis found in Christ the Apple Tree.

I’m weary of my former toil
Here will I sit and rest awhile
Under the shadow I will be
Of Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.

This fruit doth make my soul to thrive
It keeps my dying faith alive
And makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.

Mum, that’s for you. I know you are now in the embrace of that tree, and you are bearing fruit in my life to this day. Amen.