Posted by Joy Marie Clarkson had spent most of her life as a potted plant, but realized she was finally ready to become a tree.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Joy is a writer, so metaphors are her stock-in-trade. And she doesn’t just apply them to herself, but also observes how they are used in our culture.
Lately, Joy noticed that a lot of our terminology compares human beings to computers, as if we were machines. A more fitting comparison, Joy believes, is to take inspiration from the Bible and view our lives like a tree and all that entails. She shares her insights in the book, “You Are a Tree: and Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer.” We discussed it recently on “Christopher Closeup” (podcast below).
When she was growing up, Joy’s family moved 16 times. After college, she went on to pursue graduate studies and work in various universities internationally, which led to her moving once a year for 10 years. As she was packing up her apartment for yet another new season of life, she noticed a plant that had gotten scraggly because it had grown so much that the pot it was in was too small to contain it.
Joy realized, “Oh my gosh, I’m a potted plant! I’ve grown too much to fit into my little portable life. If I’m going to grow any more, then I need to be able to be in a place where I can have roots and sunshine. It gave me a language for the discomfort I was experiencing in life, of not feeling like I had a place to belong. But it also gave me a way to think about what it would look like to live a more flourishing life.”
Joy’s mind turned to imagery from Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, specifically Psalm 1, which states, “The blessed person will be like a tree which is planted by streams of living water, which bears its fruit in season, and all that it does prospers.”
That passage, explained Joy, helped her put words to the epiphany that “as human beings, we need to be rooted somewhere: to people, to a particular place; that we need sources of nourishment; and even that we have seasons, that we’re not the same in every year or even every month of our life, that there are seasons when we are fruitful and there’s abundance of harvest – but there are also seasons of winter.”
Trees can even teach us about community. For instance, while trees seem to be isolated, individual entities, their roots below the surface reach far beyond what the eye can see and intermingle with the roots of other trees. If one tree is lacking in nourishment, the other trees sustain it by passing along some of theirs. When a person is facing difficult times, he or she can also receive nourishment if enough people reach out to build that person back up.
These ideas are much more compatible with humanity than the computer imagery we often use about ourselves, when we speak of “processing things” or “downloading information.” Also, when we think of ourselves as machines, we are actually denigrating an essential part of our humanity. Computers, for instance, are designed for a functional purpose. If a computer stops functioning, you get rid of it. Humans, on the other hand, reflect the image and likeness of God. And while we do contribute to society, we have an inherent dignity beyond that. Humans should not, therefore, be discarded when we cease to do a particular job or function. And we should never think of ourselves as disposable.
Joy noted, “The metaphors we use shape how we live. So, if I describe myself as a machine…then I expect myself to act like a machine. Then I get frustrated when I don’t have the same amount of energy every day. I feel frustrated when I haven’t processed the big thing that I lost…The metaphor makes me feel bad for being a human being and not being like a machine. In that case, you need other metaphors to help you describe what’s happening inside of you and help you think about what it looks like to be a human.”
Metaphors are also crucial to our spiritual lives. Joy observed, “Metaphors allow us to speak about God, but they keep us in that posture of wonder and humility knowing that we can’t contain Him in words.” And Jesus is a metaphor master who refers to Himself as “the way, the truth and the life” and the “light of the world,” among other things.
In fact, the imagery of light as wisdom – and darkness as ignorance – is common throughout the Bible and in our everyday language. You might describe a person as “dim,” for instance, or as “brilliant.”
Joy said, “Especially in Proverbs and in the wisdom literature…God is characterized as both light and the source of wisdom. That gives us a way to think about wisdom…that it’s not just factual knowledge…but it’s a sense that wisdom is a source of perspective. It’s a source of illumination that allows us to proceed in a wise way…It means being oriented towards the source of wisdom, oriented towards God, and also having a sense of clear perspective on things.”
Another metaphor Joy addresses in “You are a Tree” is that of sadness being heavy or a burden. In Matthew 11, Jesus says, “Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest…For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
Joy observed, “[Jesus] doesn’t say you will have no burdens or you’ll have no yoke. He says that the burden you’ll carry will be light, that I can carry it with you…For life to be meaningful, there is a sense that we have to carry burdens. To love somebody, to have children, that comes with burdens…But that creates what Augustine describes as the weight of love. These burdens [of love] that we carry actually keep us on the path of life. They give us a gravity to life that moves us forward. But we, in the Christian life, need to know that we don’t bear those burdens alone, so there’s the sense that Christ bears our burdens…In Galatians, it says, ‘Bear each other’s burdens so you fulfill the law of Christ.’ So, just like Christ bore our burden of sin and of death, we get to image Him when we bear each other’s burdens and help each other carry things that are too heavy for us.”
Ultimately, Joy hopes that people who read “You are a Tree” will realize “that our everyday experiences – looking at a tree outside our window, watching the sun go set in the afternoon as it falls across our living room, climbing up a hill, carrying something – all of these experiences, which are very basic to human beings, give us ways to think about ourselves, to think about God, and to think about the world. [They] remind us that the world is shot through with meaning and with integrity because God is always speaking to us through the world.”
(To listen to my full interview with Joy Marie Clarkson, click the podcast link):
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