Witnesses of God's Goodness

Liturgically, November is the month when we especially remember our loved ones who have died. It seems appropriate, then, that Sr. Elaine Fischer and her maintenance crew have been cutting down dead trees on the Mount St. Scholastica campus the past several weeks—35 at last count. These trees are our beloved dead too. Most of us have treasured memories associated with trees—climbing them, harvesting their apples or walnuts, napping under them, watching them bend in the wind, or marveling at their vivid blooms in spring and leaves in autumn. As with our deceased grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and friends, trees that are now gone witnessed to us of God’s goodness and provided shade, fruit, and beauty to nurture us.

In A Passage About Trees, Herman Hesse says that, like us, trees are made to form and reveal the eternal in their smallest special detail. He goes on to note,

“When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.”

Our memories of the lives of our beloved dead, be they people or trees, remind us that we too are called to live with integrity, to reveal the eternal in our own unique lives of love and struggle, joy and suffering, persistence and impatience. Furthermore, as a Jewish Prayer of Remembrance says, “So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.”