“How the trees can sometimes bring you round”, was the title I gave to a piece of poetry I wrote when I was about eighteen. I don’t have it still. I wish I did, seeing as I don’t write poetry, as a general rule. As an eighteen year old you do a lot of things that get lost with the passing of time. All that angst and acne. It was written sometime in between being an unbeliever and entering into a full and living relationship with Jesus Christ, and expresses that sudden awareness that there is a lot more to everything than meets the eye, when it comes to matters concerning God and atheism and faith and doubt. And it was the trees that brought me round to that particular realisation.
Tall trees, stately trees, swaying in the winter wind trees that whistled round our home back then growing up in Coleraine. Trees, that in their own way, spoke to my heart of a Creator who formed them, placed them there, and to whom they returned glory and honour…..simply, by existing. I remember back then as I tried to express my feelings in words “how the trees can sometimes bring your round, the tall trees, the stately trees...” I wish I could remember it all. It was kind of along the lines, and possible inspired a little by the words of Isaiah, “and the trees of the field shall clap their hands as you walk out with joy” * . Words from the old book that at that time I was not ready to fully acknowledge as the Word of God, were already speaking into my life. That would come later.
Tall trees, stately trees, swaying in the winter wind trees that whistled round our home back then growing up in Coleraine. Trees, that in their own way, spoke to my heart of a Creator who formed them, placed them there, and to whom they returned glory and honour…..simply, by existing. I remember back then as I tried to express my feelings in words “how the trees can sometimes bring your round, the tall trees, the stately trees...” I wish I could remember it all. It was kind of along the lines, and possible inspired a little by the words of Isaiah, “and the trees of the field shall clap their hands as you walk out with joy” * . Words from the old book that at that time I was not ready to fully acknowledge as the Word of God, were already speaking into my life. That would come later.
And now, thirtysomething years later, I find myself walking through an ancient forest of cork trees here in Alentejo, Portugal, and the power of the trees to express something of their Creator comes back to me. These trees in particular seem to possess an ancient wisdom, if trees can be said to have wisdom. Tolkein was good at investing trees with personality with his “Ents” and his “Treebeard” in the forest of Fanghorn. I feel something of Fanghorn’s mystery here in this forest of cork oaks. Their twisted wizened shapes, their weather beaten bark and their spindly branches reaching up to your heavens.
These trees don’t have voices. They are barely able to “clap their hands” either n this windless day of summer. But without words or actions they nevertheless bring glory to their Creator. They do so, simply by existing.
* Isaiah 55:12
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