Growing up in the sixties, I thought my dad’s rules were oppressive and authoritarian. Most of them centered around the opposite sex—as if I were one of the seven vestal virgins trying to keep the lamp lit. You can guess which virgin he was afraid I might be. My life revolved around Dad’s dislike of lateness and lies as I tried to stay in both Fathers’ good graces while engaging in all sorts of hanky panky.
As a result, faith seemed transactional. If I believed, behaved and belonged to the right group’s rules, I was “not all that bad.” Even so, wrath was never far away—quickened I’m sure, by Dad’s pet peeves.
At the time, Dad couldn’t appreciate how his sternness translated into a heavenly father that was anything but heavenly. Dad thought he was keeping me pure somehow, but I couldn’t be perfect for anybody, including God who already knew about what a horrid little sinner I’d become. So I stopped trying and just assumed God was waiting for the perfect moment to cast me into the pit.
You say God doesn’t even like me? Well, the feeling is mutual, Old Dude.
I wanted to know a loving God, but I didn’t know how to get to one myself. I changed churches, got nondenominational, changed back and for a time, stopped attending altogether. No matter what I did, I thought God stood off to one side of me with a clipboard, marking off demerits and scowling.
But one day I was walking in my neighborhood, when I pulled up short. A neighbor had cut down about six very mature cedar trees lining one side of her yard. The word majestic doesn’t come close to describing these trees, with trunks like giant pillars. I couldn’t pass them without a feeling of awe.
So I asked the homeowner why, my heart aching for the loss of such beauty. She shrugged and said, “I just didn’t like them.”
She didn’t like trees that had taken decades to tower over her house, providing shade and safety for birds, insects, squirrels, opossums and raccoons? Where I saw wise old souls, she saw a blight on the area? Had the trees cried out as the chainsaws bit into them?
It was her property, her choice, I told myself. Nothing I could’ve done to change her mind.
I blinked back tears and walked on, but I couldn’t stop thinking about those cedars. I’d always been something of a tree hugger, but this punched my gut so hard I could barely breathe. I vowed to never forget the wisdom and love contained in their branches, or the animals who were displaced.
After the cedars fell, I began to see life in a different way. I started connecting to everything around me, and as silly as it sounds, I began to understand a new language. Creation spoke to me in soft whispers and sometimes, gale-force howls. Suddenly I could no longer be the human with dominion over the earth, but a partner in keeping it all going.
When my earthly dad was in charge, I understood everything as a hierarchy, with Dad and God at the top and the rest of us somewhere farther down the pyramid. Authority had the power, the status and the right to make the rules.
I was to believe in God, lean upon Jesus for salvation and work hard to make a living. The poor, the sick and the orphans mostly had themselves to blame for their lot in life. Dad seemed to think folks’ problems stemmed from laziness or wrong beliefs.
The choice lay between resentful obedience or breaking free to search for meaning. For decades I longed for a way to follow, worship and belong to love itself. I wandered for years, running toward and then rejecting answers that turned out to be just as legalistic and authoritative as Dad’s rules.
It took my neighbor’s folly and some eager chainsaws to help me discover a decent road to follow. The cedars had planted a seed—that God isn’t high above, separate from us, demanding obedience and handing out punishment to those who fall short.
Instead, what if God is everywhere all at once, speaking to us through the language of love? What if God loves me and you and everyone, but isn’t all that interested in keeping score? What if the community I was seeking is all around me, in other people, in a beautiful sunset or a stand of old trees?
The best thing about seeing God in a cedar is that it changed me. I’ve learned that when you’re preoccupied with punishment, it’s too easy to think of life as a series of transactions. Of being good or evil. Of being timely or late.
When the cedars fell, I grieved with God, lamenting the loss of beauty, but also learning to seek out beauty every moment. The more I see God’s love reflected around me, the more loving I become to others in my orbit.
St. Francis must be smiling.
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This post resonated with me. In this time when I find myself on the "other side of the fence" from many of my Christian friends, I find joy in God's creation. I remind myself that people can be terribly wrong, including myself, but God is good and perfect.