ADVENT 1: SEQUOIA

TREES OF ADVENT: GOD’S SIGNS ARE FOREVER
{sequoia gigantea}

"Cypress trees will grow where there are briars; myrtle trees will come up in place of thorns. This will be a sign that will last forever, a reminder of what I, the Lord, have done." Isaiah 55:13

Another Advent season begins: another ring in the tree of earthly years.  Longing for Jesus, together we sing,“O come, Thou Root of Jesse's tree, An ensign of Thy people be; Before Thee rulers silent fall; All peoples on Thy mercy call. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!” 

Through these days of waiting, let us look to the trees.  "For what is a tree?” Thomas Merton asks. “It is an explosion of silence…It does not speak, it is. And its being is a silent witness to God." 

Long before the birth of Jesus Christ, giant cypress trees grew upon the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains — and remain standing today.  As he walks among the sequoias, poet Paul Willis is moved by their “wooden promise kept fresh for millennia,” a “proclamation of peace on earth.”  

Through these fleeting days of Advent, may we too hold fast to God’s eternal faithfulness, meeting us even in places of briars and thorns.

“Freeman Creek Grove” by Paul Willis

Hiking down November snow,
We saw the first one still below us,
Mounding up like a junifer
In the Shasta fir and the sugar pine.

Soon the trail entered its presence
(with Thanksgiving a day behind), 
the trunk rising in dusky red, in fluted columns
Strangely soft to our curious touch.

The first branches began at the tops 
of other trees and continued into familiar wonder, 
older perhaps than the Incarnation, 
and longer rooted, and while they are here, 
shedding for us new mercy of cones 
flung green and small on the white of our steps.

We girdled the trunk with open arms, 
unable to circumference it, much less
‘to find its center.  In our random cries, 
in the things we said to our wandering children, 

I heard proclamation of peace on earth, 
a wooden promise kept fresh for millennia, 
the inaudible sound of a secret 
seed in the South Sierra where eagles 
nest in the falling snow.

“The Big Tree is nature’s finest masterpiece…the greatest of all living things…” (John Muir)