“The Challenge of a Lifetime”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
January 29, 2006
I have long been a lover of trees. I’ve even had at least a couple of what you might call religious experiences in relation to trees. One I remember well was several years ago when our family was still very young. We lived in a country house then, ten acres of land surrounded by nearly a thousand acres of state-owned forest. It really was a kind of paradise.
I remember one night after supper. It must have been in the early autumn because the trees were still filled out with green leaves, but the sun had already set at an early hour. And, while night had fallen, there was a nearly full moon hanging in the sky. Looking out our front window, it was quite bright enough to see the fences, and the trees and the valley that lay below the ridge we lived atop of.
Like most days during those early years of our family, I’d been with our three kids all day. I’m sure we must have cleaned the house and had our at-home preschool sessions, as we did each day. Maybe it had been the day that week when the four of us had baked bread. Surely, because that was our custom too, the four of us had made supper together before my wife Judy got home from work. So later, after the dishes had been dried and put away, I decided to step out for a few minutes, on my own, to go for a short walk.
I strolled up our lane, which followed the rim of the ridge up to the road. There, just across the road, was a mostly cleared expanse that was only sparsely wooded. And there in the moonlight, just a few feet in front of me, I came upon one of the most exceptional trees I had ever experienced, even though I’d seen it hundreds, maybe thousands of times before. It was beautifully shaped. It had a straight, sturdy trunk about two feet in diameter that swept in slightly from its root base at the ground and then ran true for about ten feet before burgeoning out into one of the most buoyant, verdant balls I’d ever seen.
I couldn’t help but to know, in that very moment, that it had spent its entire life nourished, not only by the rich, black Illinois soil below, but by the unencumbered sun that had daily encouraged it to stretch and reach towards fullness and health and balance. It was so beautiful, I nearly cried. Maybe I did cry, but it was surely a cry of joy.
The tree was inviting me to notice how excellent it was; how graceful; how proportionally magnificent its silhouette was against the bluish back-lit sky. It invited me to notice how delicate and vulnerable it was and yet how determined and sturdy. It showed me its precious divinity and invited me to experience my own.
I remembered the poem, “Trees,” I’d had to memorize in grade school. I wondered if Joyce Kilmer had had a similar experience of revelation when he wrote it... “A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray.” I suspected he had.
In the tree that stood there before me, I recognized a most beautiful presentation of life. Here was this spectacular living thing, just as I was a living thing. It had, growing in the ground beneath it, a network of roots that spread deep and wide, lending ballast, drawing food and water. I too had a network of roots that held me to the Earth, that provided me food and nourishment and connections to the world around me. Could my life be half as magnificent as this being that lived so intimately with nature?
And then within my revelation, a thought occurred to me with such exhilaration that it nearly took my breath away. If it were true of the tree – that it had been able to take what life had given it and then go on and live as a reflection of awesome magnificence – it could surely be true of me, of anyone, to do the same. If this tree could weather storms and drought, ice and snow, heat and cold, birds and children, or whatever else might serve as challenge, and still reach out as a constant source of beauty, grace and grandeur, well, couldn’t I take what I’d been given in my life and do the same? Wasn’t that then the true challenge of a lifetime, to take what we’d been given and to make of it something of beauty?
And I remembered still another tree, the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. And I wondered if the true author of that story also had a similar experience… of arboreal revelation. I can imagine some early forebear wandering about in the wilderness and all of a sudden…ZAP! There before him/her is a tree. And it really is the tree of knowledge. It has all the answers and they sound a lot like, “Take what you’ve been given and make of your life a thing of beauty.”
It’s so simple, at least in the midst of revelation. And yet sometimes, after the revelation has passed, after we’ve been expelled from the garden, or after learning that we have self-ness, or learning of a difficult diagnosis, or that a loved one has died or moved on, or after one of so many experiences that makes us feel separate or alone, sometimes it’s not so very simple to remember at all.
But that’s not how it is standing in front of this tree; that’s not how it was back in the garden. There it is, and it was about oneness, about unity. There it wasn’t about finding beauty; it was about being a part of all the beauty that is. And then the gods say (and it’s interesting to note that gods is plural in this Biblical story – there’s a whole team of them) the gods say, “Whoa, Bub! If you stay here in the garden with this tree, you’ll be just like us. And we can’t have that, because you aren’t just like one of us. You’ve got miles to go before you sleep. So, you’d better start walking.” And then there you are, out of the garden.
Until one evening, maybe thousands of years later, you take a short walk after dinner and ZAP all over again. For a moment, you’re right back in that garden. Once again the tree has called out to say, “It’s the challenge of a lifetime. It’s the challenge of your lifetime. Take what you’ve been given and make of your life a thing of beauty.”
In that instant you are whole. You feel it from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, from the loft of your spirit to the well of your soul. You are an experience of wholeness; you are one. You are one with the tree, one with the universe. Everything you could ever want or need is right there, and you relish the rapture of it all. And for a moment, the challenge of a lifetime isn’t such a challenge. It’s simply a gift. And you don’t have to think – just for a moment – about that next moment when it will be a challenge once again. For that moment, in front of the tree, life and the world and everything in them are in balance, are beautiful, are perfect.
Revelatory experience is a gift given to us by God, by Life, by the spirit of Life, call it what you will. The experience is simply a gift. And it is one not given too often, I suppose because we are not one of the gods, because we do have a ways to go before we join the club, become a Buddha, exist in a state of constant grace. Just from time to time though, we are given one of these little glimpses.
But that wasn’t all; there was still more. As I took a few more steps forward on that evening walk all those years ago, I came up over the lip of our lane to an even fuller landscape. No longer hidden from my vision was the thick woods that stood back a few hundred feet beyond my one perfect tree. The woods were filled with all kinds of trees: oaks, maples, walnuts, elms and others. Some were tall and stately, some were scruffy and shrub-like. The contrast between my one tree in the foreground and the many trees that stood back, was striking and almost surreal in the blue moonlight.
What immediately caught my attention was that, though it was filled with individual trees, the woods itself was one-single-living-thing. As I walked nearer its edge, I could see how the woods had sought and attained the same kind of beauty and balance, the same kind of expression of gracious response to the history of its experience, as had the one single tree that stood out before it. In community each of the trees in the woods had adjusted to all of the others. In concert they had each tailored their reaching and growing towards fullness and health and balance in ways that accommodated the strengths and the weaknesses, the sizes, the colors and the forms of the other trees that were a part of their stand.
All at once, there was another rush of realization. Only this time, it was even more powerful than the first. Everything that I had recognized as true in the one tree had become a larger truth as it enveloped the fullness of the forest. Only this time, it was not just one tree going it alone. It was more of a symphony of trees. And as melody gives way to harmony, so had the solitary grandeur of the one yielded to the manifold and diverse sophistication and grace of the many.
At once the challenge of a lifetime became more daunting than it had been only the moment before. The theme was just as true, just as simple as it had been: “Take what you’ve been given and make of it something of beauty.” Only now the truth was even larger. The one perfect tree was no less beautiful. The woods, within the complexity of its relationships, was even more beautiful.
It was clear. We are each asked by Life to make a thing of beauty with our one life. But more – much, much more – we are asked by Life to regard one another, to regard all that is, and to find our way together, in concert, to make of our collective lives that which is of incomparable beauty.
“But Wait!” I yelled into the sky, splitting the silence I hadn’t even been aware I was in. “Wait! There is a question that is left begging here. Who gets to choose? Who gets to choose what tree stands out alone and which ones stand in chorus?”
And the night sky answered back, “There are no trees that stand alone. It only sometimes seems that way.” Then I could see, even that was true.
The Japanese Aikido scholar and teacher, Mitsugi Saotome puts it: “If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.”
I walked back down the lane, stepped into the quiet house, and slipped back into my life. Judy was getting the kids ready for bed. I felt connected and warmed by the love in the house.
I don’t think I ever fully understood that experience until now, if it will ever be a possibility that I could fully understand it. There are times for each of us, when we think we stand alone, either in glory or in shame, in pleasure or in pain. But we are connected. There are times when it is our task to burrow deep within ourselves, to know the gritty truth of who we are. And when we find that truth, what we find are the connections to one another, to larger truths, to all that is.
There are times for each of us when it is of benefit to know that, just as the tree draws its life-force from trees that have gone before it, we too draw on the lifeblood and the hopes and the visions of those who have gone before us. There are times for each of us to yield space or to wield our strength, just as the forest tree gives way to an eager sapling, or leafs out into a newly formed clearing. There are times when it feels that we stand alone in order to learn the fullness of our lessons, or when we huddle close to share the shade in summer’s blistering heat or the brunt of the bitter winds bearing winter’s chill.
Even when it seems that we are most alone though, we are connected through visible and invisible threads, strands through time and space, to all that ever was, to all that is and to all that ever will be.
“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.” Yet we’ve been given the knowledge, and so we can, we must aspire. The challenge of a lifetime is to know truth – in all its complexities and compromises and compliments – to drink it in, and to make of it something of incredible beauty.
The challenge of our lifetime is here. There is much joy and sorrow, many times of struggle and even of ease, that are ours to be shared. The challenge of our lifetime is here, and there is so much gratitude and beauty and love to be expressed in it. Life has shown each of us, if each in our own way, the preciousness, the divinity within our lives. And it has invited us to experience them as our own. The challenge of our lifetime is here and there is so much living yet to be done. |
