That Yellow Tree

That Yellow Tree

Over the last three weeks or so I’ve been looking out the window of my study onto this magnificent yellow tree. Spring is here, it seems to say. New life has arrived. I can’t imagine anything more yellow. More beautiful. It was breathtaking. Oh, isn’t that beautiful!, I would say to myself. But what does it mean to say that something is beautiful, a tree, a flower, a stream where trout are darting about, or watching the woman you have loved for sixty years. There is a lot of beauty all around us. Sometimes I think my eyes are not open enough.    

Jesus was preaching in Matthew about not being so anxious, and then he says: “Consider how the lilies grow in the fields; they do not work, they do not spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his splendour was not attired like one of them.” Consider the beauty, he is saying. It will help you become more calm and peaceful.

Jesus also taught us to pray, saying,  

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy Name,

thy kingdom come, thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

This important prayer we pray each week provides an alternative view of the world, a new worldview, as we say. The prayer says there is God’s kingdom and there is the earth in which carry out our lives. Unfortunately we go out from this praying and immediately begin to separate earth and heaven. Too often earth becomes everything for us, the immediate, the physical, what we can grasp by our rational, left-brain minds.

Jesus wants us to put the two together, God’s kingdom and the earth. The earth then becomes full of wonder, full of beauty. What if we say of that yellow tree, or that field of desert flowers, that we are actually stepping into God’s kingdom? Jesus is our model here. He looked out at the lilies and the birds flying by and says look, be quiet, have peace. When I looked out my window at that breathtaking yellow, I felt as if I had stepped into God’s kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven.  

My Fishing Hole On Oak Creek

Gerard Manley Hopkins lived and wrote as if heaven and earth are one. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” he says famously in one of his poems. In another poem, “Pied Beauty,” he wants to point out the many ways God shows up in our ordinary day:

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

 I grew up in the summers on the banks of that meandering stream in the heart of Oak Creek Canyon. As the sun began to rise in the morning my mother would have our breakfast ready and as well our fishing bait prepared. I would wander my way to my beloved fishing hole, leaping over the rocks, dipping back into the woods to keep from being detected by the trout. They always knew I was there, though.

 Somehow, at that point it didn’t matter so much whether I caught a fish that day. I knew in some ways I was just looking for those “trout that swim,” with their “rose-moles all in stipple.” I threw in my line. They shot across the pool. That was enough for me. That was the beauty that God had fathered-forth for me that day. Beauty that startled me. Beauty that changed my life forever.

 I’m not sure how I did it at that age, but I know, in my own way in those moments, I would almost kneel down to “praise him.” And I still pause, here in my study, as I look out at the swaying limbs of my yellow tree. “Taste and see that the LORD is good,” the Psalmist reminds us. Consider those trees and those trout and those flowers on the hill and that beautiful woman by your side. And don’t be anxious, Jesus adds. This is enough.