To Walk with Saints and Scholars

A tree will grow anywhere. It may not grow as tall or as wide, nor live as long, if it starts life in the moss of a rock, but it will indeed grow. It brings me a kind of peace to know that things can survive even in impossible places if only for a while. Trees will find a way to grow on rocks with not a stitch of soil in sight; there is just a limit to how much they can grow. While everything can be tolerated for a time, there are limits to what we can take if we are to thrive. Sometimes we have to be moved to a new spot and tolerate the transplant shock that looks like impending death. And sometimes we have to just let the old things die. Death, too, can be a form of peace.

My move from a place where I had folks to take care with (and sometimes even to take care of) to a land where I have no one to take care of but myself has me musing. I can’t help but wonder if my discomforts here aren’t the same discomforts I had there….only more visible by virtue of the seeming peacefulness available now. I am no longer so busy that I can ignore my yearnings, my fears, and my needs. I am no longer so time-constrained that I can barrel through my days and weeks at full tilt. I am not struggling to live in the moss a rock accumulated over time, and the shock of the peace that surrounds me here is that I have to feel and honor all these uncomfortable things about me now that I cannot distract myself with merely surviving.

Mystics and people of God have always warned of the costs of peacefulness at the same time that they called us to the knowing it allows. We have been invited to sit still, to sit quietly, to take note. And when we have done so, very often we have found that something hurts or needs attention. Far from the idealized peace we see in literature and media, stillness and rest often offer us a peace that is painful. We have to see things we didn’t want to see. We have to know things we have worked hard to ignore. And while it is true that this seeing and knowing will stretch us and grow us in ways that make us healthier parts of creation, it is still work that can be hard on a heart. We get to learn that the peace we are seeking in Advent won’t necessarily look like sparkles and sweetness. The peace God wants for us in Advent, should we find it, might instead look like awareness that our roots are in a thin layer of moss instead of soil. The peace of Advent, should we find it, might look like a call to change everything…or many things… or even just one thing that is really hard to change. The peace of Advent might mean we have to let the ways we see ourselves, or the ways we live our lives, die so that we can be the next thing we are meant to be.

Because a tree can grow anywhere. But it cannot grow as tall or as wide, nor live as long, if it starts life in the moss of a rock… even if it will indeed grow. It is a complicated peace to know that things can survive even in impossible places because we also have to know they can only do so for a while. Trees will find a way to grow on rocks with not a stitch of soil in sight, but there is a limit to how far they can grow. Anything can be tolerated for a time, but there are limits to what we can take if we are to thrive. So sometimes, we have to be moved to a new spot and tolerate the transplant shock that looks like impending death. And sometimes we have to just let the old things die. And that death, too, can be a form of peace.