Missing Wonder

In this post I want to talk about trees. There is a lot more to be said about trees than you might think, and that is precisely the point of this post.

Trees and Complexity

Trees are mind-boggling. Just think of the billions and trillions of cells that work in harmony to compose such a thing. Just understanding the trunk of a tree takes a good deal of exploration, not to mention what exactly is happening inside them when they grow. And that is only the biological side of things; there is also the chemistry – why in the world does photosynthesis work, anyway? – not to mention the physics if we go beyond the cells and into the realm of atoms and quarks.

If you zoom out and look at forests and ecosystems and atmosphere, things become more complicated. If you zoom in and look at nucleons and valence electrons, things become more complicated. God’s work is not like ours; it does not lose resolution as you go deeper. Our creativity has a limit; his does not. The deeper we go, the more amazing and unique the world gets; it is not a veneer of complexity over a lump of homogeneous matter; it is unique and dazzling all the way down.

Trees and Spirituality

But a thing can be complicated and still meaningless. I love trees for reasons that go far beyond their complexity. You see, although a mature tree contains many dead cells, the seed the tree came from is bursting with life that can wait thousands of years without losing its potency. There is a power in it called life that draws sustenance from the inanimate materials around it and turns it into something beautiful and living. The seed is no less complex than the tree; complexity comes from complexity.

Then there is growth itself. Trees have better instincts than a lot of people I know. They always strain upward, with all their being, toward the sky, toward the light. They lift their arms to the sun and dance and sing in the breeze. There is almost a consciousness about their life. Perhaps in a world more awake than ours, where magic had not been driven away by evil and death, they were conscious. Perhaps they will be so again.

As I’ve said before, when looking at the natural world, Christians tend to say, “this is complicated, and God made it,” and leave it at that. But saying that something is complicated is only the jumping-off point. We must look beyond. Nature has an otherness that our man-made works do not. Our movies and architecture display the world as we think of it; nature displays the world as it is. Because of that, it can guide us into greater understanding. And this understanding is not of the physical dimension only, for as I have said before, everything – including trees – has a spiritual significance as well.

Trees and Wonder

Of course, you need a spirit to recognize that significance. You need a spirit to feel the wonder of the patterns I’ve touched on, to see a night sky or the sun through pine needles and recognize that there is goodness in every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass. And your spirit must be awake.

About a week ago, I was sitting on the bank of a gorgeous little pond near my home on a perfect summer* afternoon, drinking it all in. This post is just a beginning of thoughts on trees, but there were not only trees. There was the wind, compared to the Spirit of God and those born of the Spirit, one of the fascinations of the ancients. And of course, there was the water, equally potent and mysterious.

More than that, there were beautiful Canadian geese, with their perfectly-overlapping feathers and their slender necks and all the grace and elegance you could wish for. Every time I see them, I wonder how such a remarkable thing was conceived and designed and given life. How great must be the God who made the goose!

There were countless thoughts to be had about this familiar scene; I couldn’t drink the beauty in fast or long enough. And as I was sitting there on the grass, enthralled in wonder, a woman strolled by on the sidewalk behind me.

“You must be as bored as I am,” she said.

How much wonder there is in the world, and how few people see it! If we look at the night sky and continue to think the world empty and meaningless, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

*This is Florida. We have perfect summer afternoons in February.

“Trees and fog” by musmecigianluca is licensed under PDM 3.0