I saw the letter at last
Dear God, Designer and Creator of this lovely world, your most welcome letter was waiting for me in the woods.
I stumbled on it this morning — if one can stumble while sitting on a moss-covered rock.
Thanks, Lord. I love you too, in my own crazy way.
It took me a long time to realize the mail was in front of me, for I was full of the enthusiasm around me, the excitement of love and birth and the beginning of adventure among the wintergreen, the ferns, the strawberries, and scores of plants I cannot name.
Every time I venture into your woods, I see another product of your hands. Your creation has no limits.
I saw the letter at last, but it took me a long time to read it and a longer time to understand what I had read.
The snow had entirely disappeared. The first dandelions had come to dazzle us. The columbines had dared to send up their first shoots but were still too bashful to light their lanterns. They need a little more encouragement from your sun and shade and rain.
The violets are still hesitant and shy. They know it is May, but they haven’t clearly heard your word. They await your full command.
We are impatient, God, we mortal men and women. We want everything in our gardens and our woods and fields to come up at once. We do not realize that you have a time for each and every plant to bloom, to bear, and to die. We want things to happen in our time, never in yours.
I was looking at clover patches, trying to find one with four leaves. I was looking for little stones — shopping for gems for your Mother’s statue on my desk, and I was listening to the whisky voices of a dozen tipsy crows.
In spite of my absorption, I did see the birch and noticed it had crashed. I was not surprised, exactly, for I had known it must someday fall. It was rotten at the core. It was majestic, though, and it towered high in your blue sky, its white limbs writing poetry against the darkness of the surrounding trees. …
Evidently a heavy gale had toppled this big birch, a fierce wind from the west; the bulk of it had fallen toward the east, toward the rising sun. Part of the trunk stood up straight, like the monument that marks a grave. The rest of it lay across the rocks and the shrubbery of a clearing, part of it still attached to the broken stump.
The snows had covered it like a shroud during most of the winter. It had emerged now, a huddle and a scatter of beautiful dead white limbs, yet with budding leaves, making love to you, on what had been its topmost branches. The sap still ran through it!
You do not write in words, Lord.
You write in trees and flowers and grasses, in stones and stars, in winds and waters, in men and women, and in everything that can be seen or heard or smelled or touched or tasted.
It is never easy to put your message into words.
Your letter had been tattooed on the upstanding part of the trunk by the sharp, hard beaks of many woodpeckers. It made a honeycomb pattern pleasant to the eye, a sort of secret cipher.
The burrowing, crawling worms had added a cryptogram, with their many graceful s’s. (How the modern antique maker would love those worm tracks!)
The design puzzled me, but Love gave me the key. Your love for me, and mine for you.
So I understood and put it into words that others may read. You share my letters to you. Why shouldn’t I share yours to me?
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“I am the author of birth,” you wrote. “You rejoice in the new life you see all about you, the evidence of my power and my love. It is good that you rejoice.
“Rejoice now because of this fallen tree. It is a true symbol of my love. Through it I gave shade and shelter to birds and beasts and men. Through it I tempered the force of the wind and the heat of the sun for the tender plants beneath its branches.
“Through it I furnished young boys and girls with sheets of flimsy paper — a million colors blended in each square inch — that they might draw funny pictures on it or write messages to one another or fashion it into small canoes. (Were not the first canoes in this land made of this same birch bark?)
“Now I give you its wood for a hundred cheerful fires.
“In this tree I furnished fresh meat daily to the woodpeckers and strong sweet sap to the insects and the worms.
“Even the least and lowest of my creatures must have its daily bread; I must give it.
“You? So infinite is my love for you that I give you even Myself.
“My body to eat! My blood to drink.
“Should you not be strong and perfect and filled with joy? Should you not love me more?
“Should you not feel close to me, since I am so close to you?
“I am the author of birth.
“I am the author of death.
“How do you know there is not more joy in death than there is in birth?
“A woman, when she has brought forth the child, remembers her anguish no longer, for joy that a man has been born into the world. Yet, there is pain in every life and disappointment and frustration and terror, sometimes, even hideous despair — while only in death is the beginning of unending joy.
“A man is like a tree. I raise him from a tiny seed into a rival of the angels. I raise him high, if it pleases me. And I cut him down when I am ready. I use him for my own purposes: to give comfort and fruits and many other good things to my children, to show my love to the world, throughout the world. And to come to me when I beckon.
“You I have given nearly eighty-five years. That is a long time, my son. You have not always stood straight in my wind and my sun and my sky. A long time ago you fell away from me, even as the birch fell from its decaying trunk.
“Yet the sap still flows through this wreckage on the ground. The budding leaves have testified to this. My grace still lives in you. Pray that it continues to the end.”
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Lord, even in my most charitable inclinations toward myself, I have never thought of me as a birch tree, a symbol of purity.
I am a tough scrub bush, Lord.
My branches trail in the mire and the dust. They have been gnawed and scarred by many mean little sins, even as the limbs of small trees are nibbled and scratched by hares and rats and porcupines and other humble beasts.
I do not ask you to make me tall and splendid, though I know you could do it, even with such scrub-a-dub material as I am.
I do not ask to be a mighty oak or elm or maple, nor yet a fragrant pine or cedar.
Let me remain a squat, unaromatic, unnoticed, droopy bush. And let me stay rooted in the earth no longer than you plan.
Let your grace seep into me through the beautiful hands of your dear lady, our Immaculate Mother. Let it expand, even though it bursts through my splintery, thorny bark and spills over into the earth around me.
Let it continue to circulate in me, even as the sap still works in this old tree on the ground!
Cut me down when You are ready, Lord, and take me to your mill. …
From here to heaven!
How long will it take?
Exciting, yes — and nice to remember all eternity.
Thanks again, God, for your unexpected love letter.
Excerpted from Psalms of a Sinner, Abbey Press, St. Meinrad, 1976.
