[examine the above picture...drawn by my brother john btw]
Do you notice the man sitting beneath the "tree"? he sits contently under the shade of this tree, the seed of which was planted by him. the tree has matured, firmly rooted, yielding much fruit. the tree provides shelter and food in abundance. a blessing?
the roots draw nourishment without discretion, often siphoning resources from the 2nd and 3rd world, depleting and destroying life in places out of sight and surely out of mind.
if you notice, the "tree" looks eerily like a nuclear explosion, the fallout of which is yet to be felt. this explosion and pending doom and destruction is the delayed effect of the man's well-intentioned efforts to sow a good seed, to seek his own welfare.
he will reap what he has sown, that's just the way things are
when i first looked at this picture by my brother, i was curiously captivated and have since failed to forget it. i almost immediately was reminded of the The Wounded Healer
, a thin book by Henri Nouwen who refers to a subject as "nuclear man" and discusses the predicament of modern man. these thoughts were reignited by a recent post on a website i read occasionally, www.opensourcetheology.net. in one of the responses was the following quote:
"many of us [myself included] still contribute to the problem! Above all, we can’t “set ourselves apart” by breaking away. The church must suffer with the world, acknowledging that we’re a part of the problem and will face the same consequences for our negligence as everyone else. As Lynn White argued in his touchstone essay, “The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Christianity is a prime contributor to the problem, but the church must be a part of the solution.
it's a complicated world we live in and we would do well to deeply consider the implications and ramifications or our every decision and action.
for some reason, i think of Adam & Eve in the garden, staring at a piece of fruit that was (1) good for food, (2) was pleasing to the eye, and (3) was to be desired to make one wise (Genesis 3:6). so many "trees" in our lives look the same. just because a "tree" yields fruit, doesn't mean it's good for us or anyone else...some fruit might eventually kill us. we must be wise...huh, but then again, where does that wisdom come from...a tree?
