JULY 13 2019
EVERYTHING BETTER IS BOUGHT AT THE PRICE OF SOMETHING WORSE.
That is a quote from C. G. Jung, the great psycho-analyst who died in 1961. You want an example? Our adored automobile is an immense improvement over the horse and buggy, but the price? Climate Calamity.
There’s another Jung statement that struck me: “The less we understand what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves….Our ability to embrace anything new is limited because we are our ancestors and whatever they never knew we can’t make part of our lives.”
Having lost the link to our ancestors, there’s nothing left to hold on: we have lost our anchor. The result is utter disdain for the natural world, loss of religious belief, rootlessness and global disaster.
Take Trees.
New research by two Russian scientists, Makarieva and Gorshkov has shown that there is such a concept as a biotic pump. They discovered that the ecosystem controls the Earth’s climate in a much deeper and stronger way than commonly believed: our forests are immense machines that pump water away from the oceans to the land. Forests, especially the Amazon Rain Forests are needed, not just trees, not just grass, not just pastures, not just cultivated fields. Only and only fully grown forests keep the machine running and provide the biosphere with the water it needs.
By now we know all too well that humans are destroying the world’s forests. We keep eliminating the things that make us live. Trees make us live and keep us healthy and wise.
It reminds me of that beautiful line in the Bible’s very last chapter, “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22: 2.)
Let me start with ‘nations.’ When in Matthew 28: 19 Jesus gives us the Great Commission, the same word ‘nations’ is used. It actually does not refer to individual countries, but to everything connected to people, such as races, sexes, ethnic and faith communities, economic classes, families, and tribes.
Thus “the leaves of the trees are for the healing of all humans in the world”, and also applies to the world itself, because humans and earth are one.
FOREST BATHING
This past week our oldest son gave me an amazing book to read: FOREST BATHING, by Dr. Qing Li, an associate professor of medicine at the Nippon medical school in Tokyo. I immediately ordered 5 copies of the book for our church’s Environmental Team. I also engaged one of our grandsons, an arborist to make some trails through the pine forest I planted some 35 years ago. Especially coniferous trees, such as pine, spruce and cedar generate a lot of oxygen and also emit such elements as “Phytoncides”. The word “Phytoncide” comes from the Greek ‘phyton= plant’ and ‘cides = kill’. These trees exhale these substances and so protect them from insects, bacteria and fungi. Through these chemicals they also communicate with other trees. Their concentration is the highest when the temperature is 30 degrees Celsius.
The learned doctor discovered that exposure to phytoncides increases the NK = Natural Killers count, which, he suspects, have anti-cancer effects. Yes, the leaves of the trees are healing agents, but our entire lifestyle enhances the tree- killing syndrome.
I read last week that 170 million trees in California alone are fallen victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. A few years ago, in urban Texas the prolonged heat there killed more than five million shade trees, and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, prolonged severe droughts are killing many billions more in the rain forests, while the new right-wing government in Brazil is determined to clear more rainforests there to accommodate agriculture.
Should I mention Forest Fires?
Every tree that dies or burns adds to Global Warming. You may have noticed that Alaska has never been hotter: 35 C!!. These high temperatures there are also warming up the water of rivers, causing warm water to flow into the seas around Alaska, while the many fires there are causing soot to be deposited on mountains and sea ice, further speeding up the demise of the snow and ice cover in the Arctic.
Dying trees mean a dying planet. There is no doubt in my mind that ‘the creative destruction’ of capitalism will persist to its bitter end, when money, the all-consuming Mammon, will have accomplished what has been Satan’s aim from the beginning: to destroy God’s creation.
Just as Jesus had to go through death to achieve life, the Bible tells us that creation too has to go through death to achieve life, and this time we humans are the cause.
The New Testament, in 2 Peter 3: 10, makes clear that the days of the world are counted and that the end will come unexpectedly: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”
So, let me go back to that poetic sounding sentence in the Bible’s very last chapter:
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
The last two chapters of the bible, Revelation 21 and 22, picture a world where, as yet, no humans are present. But there are trees, lots of them.
The Garden of Eden had an identical development: everything there had to be in perfect shape before humans could appear. It is my argument that prior to the saints’ arrival in the new creation to come, the presence of trees will be instrumental for them to enter a virginal, pristine, unpolluted planet. I believe that the earth must first go through a recuperating process with trees as the primary agents of healing, because, basically, there is nothing wrong with God’s world that time – and the absence of sinful humans – cannot heal. And time is immaterial for the Lord for whom ONE day is as a thousand years.
We know about forest fires: they are a natural phenomenon, needed to rejuvenate forests, because a fire will kill the old and sick and bring to life the buried seeds. Peter was right about the all-consuming fire. For the new creation to come, our worn-out world needs a total conflagration to reveal the new to come, and trees play an enormous role in this process.
For that purpose a closer examination of what trees do is necessary.
We all know that trees are the lungs of the world. For humans to have one hundred percent pure air and ‘live forever’ a totally clean environment is required: hence the need for the new world to be fully filled with forests of trees.
Trees are more than oxygen providers. The tree’s underground system is as important as its foliage: the roots and its capillaries are just as essential for the welfare of the earth as the more visible branches, because a tree stands in its own decomposition. Much of the tree sheds its own weight many times over to earth and air, eventually becoming grass, fungus, and promoting the life of insects, birds and mammals. It is the cooperation of these many ‘by-products’ that make a tree so rich – they exist because of the tree, belong with it and function as part of it.
Birds nest, squirrels burrow and eat fungus, and insects prune and assist in decomposing the surplus leaves and activate essential soil bacteria. Animals are messengers to the tree and trees act as a garden for animals. This is an excellent example of life depending on life. A tree is a total being that involves minerals, plants, animals, debris and life. All of these elements make up the ‘tree cooperative’. All this has to be in place before the saints are coming home.
“The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the human population and for the earth itself.”
The leaves absorb the CO2 that has now made our weather so unpredictable and even deadly. The new earth, covered with healthy trees will completely heal the earth and clean the air, making it the perfect place for the ‘redeemed of the Lord, who will enter singing’ (Isaiah 35: 10) on the way to embrace their new abode.
So what about these leaves? Leaves have twice the specific heat capacity as soil, meaning plants can be about 9 degrees Celsius warmer than their surrounding environment. Consequently trees moderate extreme temperatures and humidity so it is tolerable enough to accommodate life. The leaves catch the rain, some of which the tree absorbs, and the remainder returns to the air through evaporation. Any rain that falls through the canopy has, on its way down, collected plant cells and nutrients and is much richer than regular rainwater. This through-fall is then directed to shallow roots, and serves all the needs of growth in that forest. Therefore trees use, collect, enrich and properly direct water so it can best be used in the forest system without human intervention.
Trees are not just here to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen for us to breathe. Their purpose reaches much farther. Trees fight drought, prevent soil erosion, stabilize earth, shade us from sun, are key in the conservation of water, provide us with heat, control the effects of wind, provide shelter for animals and encourage biodiversity and nutrients for soil. God created trees because the trees are life.
Yes, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Trees are not only for the earth: the seas too benefit as do the inland streams. Revelation 22: 2 again: “at each side of the river stood the Tree of Life.”
Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrives, so does the rest of the food chain. Fishermen have planted trees along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Before the humans return to paradise, trees have to clean it for them. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of soaking up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phyto-remediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution: indeed the leaves of the tree are cosmic healers!
So it makes perfect sense that the Bible starts with the Tree of Life, ends with the Tree of Life and has at its centre the Tree of Golgotha where our eternal life was assured. These three ‘trees’ are symbols of all trees explaining that simple sentence in the last chapter of the Bible which says:
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
Here’s an interesting note: In the 17th Century a Japanese delegation visited the Netherlands to investigate Christianity there. Reading FOREST BATHING I can understand why they rejected its Calvinist version. The merchants in the Dutch Golden Age lived by commerce, hauling trees from Sweden, slaves from Africa, gold from South America.
Here is a quote from that book, “Nature is not separate from mankind in Japanese culture. It is part of us. And the need to keep the two in harmony can be seen in every aspect of life, from the design of gardens that incorporate the natural landscape to the design of houses that blur inside and outside by means of translucent paper screens……….We are all connected to nature, emotionally, spiritually and physically.”
Who has the correct approach, the stern Dutch, dealers in timber, or the Japanese, lovers of timber?
It seems to me that we are going full circle. In the beginning the earth was fully covered with trees, as TREES were LIFE, assuring long, long lives.
Now, a denuded earth has become a death trap, as trees and their benefits are disappearing, making us yearn for their healing powers. The vanishing forests are finally focusing us to acknowledge how all of creation is of divine origin, while appreciating the healing power of TREES.
EVERYTHING BETTER IS BOUGHT AT THE PRICE OF SOMETHING WORSE. However there’s one exception: with Jesus’ sacrifice, his death on the cross, he brought about the new creation, making everything better: the price too was something better: RESURRECTION AND LIFE ETERNAL.