Groaning with Creation in Lent

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”  Rom 8:22

Unexpectedly and painfully, my Lenten practice this year has become that of active participation in the groaning of creation that Paul describes in Romans 8. Early in March, driving up the street towards our Birmingham home, I discovered, in place of a pleasant green forest of tall pines and aging oaks, an empty space of sky. We and our neighbours, with properties sloping uphill to the forest, had not imagined that the construction planned behind and over the crest of the hill would require a total clear cut. Communication through the contractor had left us expecting that a certain depth of forest cover would remain standing along the ridge adjacent to our homes. Had we misunderstood or been misled?  

In the warm sunshine of that spring afternoon, I stood shocked on our back patio. I could not see beyond the edge of the hill to the actual work site – but I could hear (amid the beeping, droning sounds of the machinery) the wrenching and snapping of wood and then watch each tree as it shook and disappeared, ripped out of the skyline. Helpless, horrified, I wept for the land we had known for only ten months but that had given us such consolation and joy.

All last summer and fall, Dean and I revelled in the beauty, privacy, and quietness of the forest behind our home. Mornings before Dean left for work we sat side-by-side on our back patio, he with his coffee, me with my tea, binoculars handy. We watched and listened for birds we had not known in Saskatchewan – Cardinals, Blue Jays, Blue Grosbeaks, Indigo Buntings, and Carolina Wrens. Our beautiful back yard lowered Dean’s blood pressure. The serenity and birdsong eased us through the stresses of a cross-cultural move that left family and much-loved friends far behind, through the stretching involved in Dean’s new job, and through the repeated hits of anxiety-inducing paperwork which we discovered were required to live and own a home in the United States.  

Following a January wind storm, I mourned the broken-off top limbs of a prominent, dead snag tree from which local woodpeckers had called and surveyed their territory. Now the whole tree was gone, as were all the others that – busy with Red-bellied and Downy Woodpeckers, White-breasted and Brown-headed Nuthatches, Red-shouldered Hawks, and crows – had stood near it.  

I phoned Dean at work, warning him to be prepared when he drove up to the house. Still, when he arrived home his face was deeply grieved; “I feel like vomiting,” he said. With the workers gone home for the day, we climbed up the hill to view the wreckage. Some trees remained standing; perhaps the work was done and these would remain as part of the landscape.  

But the next morning the machines began again. I watched, stunned, as one of the few mature trees left along the edge of the hill was cut away, then ran for my shoes to storm up our hillside and stand protectively in front of the sole remaining tree at the top of our property. “Please,” I begged the machine operator, “please leave us this one tree.” He said that he would try, but of course his job was just to follow  instructions. He drove his machine to another part of the construction site.   

I retreated into my office in the house, my safe place. This is my inherent response to stress – withdrawing to a safe place in order to manage the pain. Even in my office, however, relentless crunching, tearing sounds seeped through the closed window bringing tears to my eyes and a painful tightening to my throat, neck, and shoulders.  

By evening, just a few thin lines of trees remained visible from our property, holding their branches bravely into the sky. How grateful I was that at least a remnant of forest was left.

Six days later, early in the morning as I drowsed comfortably in my bed, I recognized the beeping sound of machinery on the hill behind our property. Wondering, groggy, I stepped into the kitchen, looking out and up through the window, and gasped. There, before my eyes, the machine I’d learned to dread was ripping the lone tree from the top of our hill. Reflexively, seeking some comfort, I wrapped my arms around myself and squeezed, rocking. Unrelenting, uncaring, the machine moved on, casually uprooting trees I had hoped were left to us, emptying the sky of leaf and limb. 

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” Yes, groaning. In this unchosen Lenten practice of groaning with and weeping for our tiny sliver of stripped creation, my loss is not unique; it’s not even unusual. Surely every one of us can soberly list a place or places of great beauty irrevocably lost to the jaws of development, to flood, to fire, to the devastation of tornado or hurricane. Whether built over or burned over, they can never be the same.

What is it about trees that can touch our hearts so intimately? It is so much more than an intellectual assent of their monumental role in producing clean air and water, cooling our streets and cities, providing flood protection. Trees (even, research shows, just the sight of a tree) feed us and heal us, body and mind. Trees – long-lived olives, tall and ancient sequoias, flowering Japanese cherry trees, red-leafed eastern maple forests in autumn – call us to a sense of wonder. The loss of a tree or trees, especially a wanton destruction, triggers a response in us. 

England’s 300-year-old “Sycamore Gap Tree”, growing in solitary glory adjacent to Hadrian’s Wall and made famous in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was illegally cut down by vandals in September 2023. People across England and abroad (including me) were shocked and heartbroken, expressing their personal feelings of loss for a tree considered a national landmark and with which they felt a personal connection. 

In his epic novel The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien described in great detail the evil destruction of ancient and beloved trees by Saruman and his human-like but distorted creatures, the orcs. C.S. Lewis’s characters in The Last Battle responded, outraged and grieved, to the felling of the “holy trees” in the forest of Lantern Waste. Surely both Tolkien and Lewis carried personal memories of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the countryside of England and of Northern Ireland (as well as memories of stark, desolate World War 1 battlefields in France.) 

When our family lived in Lithuania in the late 1990s, we were told that when the Soviets were in the process of subjugating that country after World War 2, a common practice was to raze ancient, life-giving shade trees lining country roads. On top of everything else that happened during a shockingly inhumane era, I was struck by the brutality of that dehumanizing action.  

The emotional impact I felt as our little ecosystem was ripped down felt huge, but it was also cumulative, built on my history. I carry embodied memories of the western red cedars, large-leaf maples, and fruit trees of my first childhood home, including one large-leaf maple tree with which I felt a special, loving connection. Across the road from my second home, in company with our old dog, Pedro, I routinely wandered the temperate rainforest woodland covering the hills and valleys running down to the Fraser River. When I was 11, however, my parents moved us from British Columbia’s rainy forests to the untreed prairie edges of Calgary where we had one willow tree in our back yard. My childhood self shed many tears nestled next to that one tree. Slowly, over the decades, I adapted as best I could to living on the plains. In southern Saskatchewan, most of the few trees one saw were either planted around farms or next to houses, were scrub trees following wrinkles in the few hills, or were riparian forests lining river floodplains. None of them grew quickly, so each one felt precious. 

But wherever I lived, my eyes and my body longed for the nearness of trees. I began to notice, when the road from our prairie home took us to Vancouver or to forests in the north, my body noticeably relaxing; I felt somehow more myself. When returning from forested holidays back to the prairies, sudden, deep sadness often surprised me. During the years Dean and I had homes on the Saskatchewan prairies, we planted, in hope, numerous trees, too many of which did not survive the killing elements of cold and wind and drought and blight.* So one of the comforts and gifts of our big move to Alabama was the beauty of the trees – magnolias, pines, oaks, maples. We took delight in them and they refreshed our souls.

Shortly after noon last Friday I went outdoors to pull weeds from the back lawn. To the left of our property line on the hilltop stood several trees, trees I assumed to be beyond the edge of the worksite. I had comforted myself with the sight of those trees every day since our forest was flattened, savoured the green of the pines and the new-bursting leaves of the oaks. Until I heard it again – too close, the beep-beep-beeping on the hill that signalled my body to feel afraid. The first of the trees began to be shaken. Beep-beep-beep. The tree flailed and disappeared, dragged to the chipping pile. I found myself keening over onto the grass, then wanting to run and hide from the horrible sounds. 

But this time I didn’t leave and I didn’t cry. In the days since the forest first fell, I’d been reflecting on the word “witness”. As a young person growing up in church, we were encouraged to “witness” to others – tell the story about what we understood of the life and presence of God in the world, tell the story of what we thought he might be doing in our lives. That action of storytelling we described as “witnessing”. But we hear in the gospel story about some, mostly women and John, who stood witness. Helpless, grief-stricken, exhausted, they were present at the cross to an experience unimaginable just hours before. Rather than run away to a safe place, through the gracious provision of God’s spirit they were somehow able to stand in that hard place. They didn’t run away.

In no way was my experience comparable to that of those persons present during the torture and death of Jesus! However, I do believe that God in grace gave the provision of His Spirit during what was, for me, a hard, hard thing.  

God helping me, to the best of my ability, I stood witness firmly, wiggling my toes so I could feel the ground. As each tree began to shake under the destructive grip of the unseen, beeping machine, I raised my hands. “God,” I prayed, “thank you for the life of this tree.” I spoke my gratitude for the faithful and God-honouring work of each tree in the specific place where it lived its generous life. I spoke in praise for the shade it provided, for the many birds and creatures it housed in its life, for how it cleaned the air. Each lived the life its Creator intended for as long as it could.  

But when the last tree had been taken down and I lowered my arms, I felt very tired. Poetry, and in this case an excerpt from “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, gives profound, consoling voice to the loss I feel when I return to our back yard, look up the hill and remember.

“…Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

*Sadly, the specific trees in Surrey that I loved as a child have not survived, either.  They were flattened to make way for apartments, streets, and houses.