Last month,
JPC had its first retreat in many years. The sixteen of us who attended had a
wonderful day of being together at the spectacularly beautiful Holston Camp. Our
day began with a slow, hour-long hike led by Dr. Stewart Skeate (skeet), a biology professor from Lee’s
McCrae College. With good humor and obvious passion for the natural world, Dr.
Skeate talked to us about various trees, ground plants, and one toad.
When asked
about the age of trees, Dr. Skeate said that some of the larger ones could be
anywhere from 100-300 years old. Then he tugged gently at a small, spindly sapling
next to him. “And this little tree could be as much as thirty to fifty years
old itself.” (The towering ancients stunt the growth of younger trees.) “The
small ones are waiting for the old ones to fall, and when the summer sun
reaches the forest floor, they’ll grow much more efficiently.”
Grace can be a harsh reality. In
order to make room for some new growth in ourselves, our communities, our
institutions, something must give way, maybe even something magnificent. Life
has always been this way. Each visible example of growth – each tree, shrub, weed,
and mushroom – is rooted in and an expression of the Deep Mystery always at
work beneath the surface. A tree is a kind of magnum opus of the Earth, and
Mystery still requires even the mightiest oak to fall and nourish the process
that sustained it, perhaps for untold hundreds of years. Trees flourish and
die. The Earth remains.
Love is to us what the Earth is to a
forest. Because we emerge from and return to the fertile Mystery of Love, Paul
writes: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every
family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that…Christ may dwell in
your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray
that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the
breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that
surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:14-19)
Each of us is a magnum opus of God.
And each of us will die.
In your own short and irreplaceable
life, may you be nurtured and humbled by Love.
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