Judgment is Near
As the wilderness goes, so go we
“Judgment is NEAR,” screamed up at me in blurred pink chalk on the side of the greenway. Near was spelled out in all caps as if to underscore just how close this judgment was. This warning was coupled with something about turning to Jesus and closed with the reference John 14:6.
I’ve been walking this greenway for about four years now and these pink chalk messages are new. Their arrival coincides with the razing of ten or more acres of older growth forest, top soil scraped away, mycelial network damaged all to put up rows and rows of soulless square houses replete with scrawny, non-native trees as part of their “landscaping.”
It took me a while to walk that section of the greenway again. It used to feel like a magical forest. Now there’s still a patch of forest on one side, but on the other side, only a few feet of trees stand between the path and the houses. They even took out trees between the houses and the stream, a place they couldn’t even build, but instead planted non-native turf grass they keep cut within an inch of its life.
I finally ventured into that section again, the bird songs replaced with constant construction noises, and felt the sadness of the trees. A hole had been torn in their community, sisters, cousins, friends all torn away, and for what? Why this section of land when there are fields and pastures unused? Why tear down hundreds of years of tree growth in this semi-rural part of the world that is certainly not hurting for land?
They’d known mistreatment at the hands of humans for years before this, so it seemed more of a culmination perhaps. There’s the shagbark hickory close to the path that’s missing all the shaggy pieces of her bark for the first seven to eight feet of her height. The birch who was unfortunate enough to be inches from where they ran this strip of pavement and is now adorned with scars where people saw beauty and left pain in the form of cartoon hearts and initials to commemorate what I’m sure are mostly long dead relationships.
Judgment has already come for this section of the woods, part of it tried and executed by someone who decided they had the right to do so because of a piece of paper–part of another tree somewhere–that said they owned this land and therefore could do whatever they wanted to it. For the people who perpetuated this, it often seems as though judgment never comes. And now one of the new residents in one of the houses is screaming at passerbys with pink-chalked messages of doom. They who benefited from the judgment on the trees now want to convince the rest of us that we are doomed.
And I can’t help but think we are, but not for the reasons they think. We pass judgment on ourselves and our planet every time we raze a patch of forest for no good reason. Planting trees elsewhere doesn’t compensate. You can’t cut down a two-hundred year old oak and replace it. It takes two hundred years.
Did you know that the three largest trees in the forest store seventy percent of the information and energy in the forest?1 If you cut them down, you hurt the entire life of the forest, sickening the adjacent trees, and I can only imagine this also damages the trees’ stories about themselves.
I walked a different greenway one day this week, scouting the location for an introductory night hike for my youngest’s cub scout pack. After I’d walked the initial loop, I started around again to explore an unpaved path that led off into the woods on this peninsula in the lake. I soon found myself in a grove of trees and felt uneasy. I stood there for a moment trying to make sense of the feeling, but feeling repulsed, I started to retrace my steps. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “I never feel repulsed by the forest.” I paused and placed my hands on the bark of a young tree and closed my eyes. I saw images of partying, people littering the woods with their trash, and young women being taken advantage of. People abusing the welcome of the trees, and using the space with no respect to the forest, each other, or themselves. “I’m so sorry they’ve treated you this way,” I murmured. And then the feeling of being repulsed stopped. I worked my way around the other side and found a spot covered in beer cans and discarded bottles. I’d seen a couple along the way, but this was a plethora of fading aluminum and glass in various stages of the paper labels fading away.
I entered the grove again from another side and found the mother tree. She was dying, most of her enormous limbs lay on the ground arrayed around the multi-part trunk still standing. Only only trunk still had any leaves on branches, the rest stood silent. My entry startled three deer who were clearly used to the humans staying on the tamed part during the morning hours. I apologized and moved slowly towards the trunk of the tree, keeping my body angled away from them. The young buck still bounded away but the two young does eyed me and resumed their careful grazing. I balanced my phone against my shoulder and peeked sideways to take their picture. I’d read in Jarod Anderson’s memoir that if you don’t square your body to deer and stare at them straight on, that they don’t see you as a threat, and that seemed to be working here. I paid my respects to the mother tree and the deer stayed as close as ten feet away, completely unbothered.
I picked my way carefully, mimicking the deliberate steps of the deer as I made my way back out to the paved path, startling some humans who clearly didn’t expect to see one of their kind emerge from the untamed parts. And this is why I think judgment is near. We’ve abandoned our wild, have been taught to fear the wilderness, and so we commodify it and try to force it to be something that doesn’t scare us. But it only scares us because we no longer understand it. We forgot that we only exist in relationship to and with everything else. We forgot that as the wilderness goes, so go we.
Tea and Paint
Only the Forest Sees me Naked
“I wish I could still believe in God, but I can’t be a Christian anymore because of ______” Fill-in-the-blank with racism, misogyny, homophobia, toxic capitalism, and so on. I’ve had this conversation with different people almost word-for-word over and over. White American Christianity has so defined God that many people cannot separate God from the toxic theology they were taught.
But this isn’t the God I see in the Bible. The Bible shows us a God meeting people where they are and nudging them towards justice and total thriving for all: shalom. The Bible details arcs of justice and societal reform. If we understand how radical those arcs were in the context of the day, we can extend them forward into the future and figure out how to work for justice, total thriving, and societal reformation in our day.
I grew up in that first world view. Come along, and I’ll tell you the story of how I escaped, and I’ll show you a theology that I believe paints a more accurate picture: a faith for the common good where everyone thrives and no one is left out.
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Anna Elisabeth Howard writes highly caffeinated takes on shalom as a lens for everything from her front porch in Hendersonville, TN where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is a community organizer and movement chaplain with a background in youth and family ministry and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. An avid hiker and backpacker, many thoughts start somewhere in the middle of the woods, or under a waterfall. She is a regular contributer to Earth & Altar and her latest book is Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good.
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I highly recommend Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree for more on this and how forests are connected and commnicate, as well as Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.