The search for God’s presence on a treeless street

Like a gangrenous limb, they had to be removed. Nineteen pine trees, 15 ficus and two of a variety unfamiliar to me. They were crumpling sidewalks, gutters and curbs, and choking and crushing sewers.

Homeowners, including me and my husband, had been forced to call Roto-Rooter every three months for years. Most of us have had to replace our main sewer lines at least once. The rutted sidewalks were inviting falls and broken bones.

The august trees, more than 30 years old, had to come out. I know, I know.

To watch, though, was unbearable. The sounds were awful enough. Even doors and double-glazed windows couldn’t close out the noise from the machinery workers used to fell the trees, chop them to pieces, grind them to sawdust and haul the sawdust away.

In a poem penned in 1902, Dorothy Frances Gurney wrote, “One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.”

Judging from the websites of gardeners on the Internet, many still agree with her.

For me, the line would ring truer if it said, “One’s heart and mind and soul can draw nearer to God in a wood or grove than anywhere else on earth.” Even Jesus, in his most agonizing hour, called out to his father from Gethsemane, a grove of olive trees.

My first memory of God was a surprise encounter in a North Carolina wood. On a cool spring day, I sprawled on a sweet-smelling floor of moss and leaves under the lacy shade of untold saplings and trees.

As I watched the blue sky and cottony clouds flicker behind their dark limbs and leaves, the songs of angels seeped out of heaven and washed over me. The music let me know that the angels and their maker ? my maker ? were watching over me.

Throughout the early years of my life, my family moved nearly every year. As soon as I made new friends, it seemed, I was leaving them behind to start all over again. But the woods, wherever we lived, were like many houses of God where I could drop by anytime.

The trees were my constant companions. My confidants. Sweet gum and sassafras. Slippery elm and shortleaf pine. Dogwood. Chinaberry. Mimosa. Magnolia.

I’d nestle in the shelter of their canopies, take in their heady fragrances and watch the world from above. Or I’d lie at their feet with a root as my headrest in soothing solitude.

Then we moved to coastal Southern California where there were no woods, and the only groves consisted of pungent orange trees hemmed in by eucalyptus trees with their astringent, stinking bark and leaves. Like the scattered palms, they offered no shade or soft, leaf-covered ground. In any case, to enter them was to trespass.

We first looked for a place to live in Santa Ana, near the Marine Corps air station where my father would work. Some of the homes had huge yards and old gardens with plum, nectarine and apricot trees, and towering avocados. Grass, not a woodsy blanket, spread out beneath their cool shade.

If I couldn’t have a wood nearby, this, I hoped, would do. But my father’s monthly military salary couldn’t quite bear the rent, so we moved into a cracker-box apartment in Costa Mesa instead, where drought-tolerant ornamental strawberries, ice plant and crushed white rock stood in for grass. What the landlord passed off as a yard was scarcely larger than our dinette table. There wasn’t a shade tree in sight. Instead, a huge, barren, orange-dirt lot stretched alongside the rows of apartments where we lived. When the Santa Ana winds whipped through Orange County, dry tumbleweeds rolled in, huddling there like the spooky skeletons of boulders.

Just as I’d sat in the woods and groves of North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama, I’d sometimes sit in that desolate lot after school. Its dust collected in my ears, my nostrils, my teeth, my hair.

I began to grasp the meaning of a godforsaken place. In the grit and the shadeless heat of the sun, I’d wonder if this was what hell was like.

I felt like Eve must have felt when God cast her and Adam out of paradise. Under the often-cloudless sky, I would ask God and the angels, “Where have you gone?”

Surely, I’d think, God had made this parched patch and these thorny tumbleweeds just as he’d made the fertile woods and groves I so loved. So why would he not be here? Was he hiding? Had I lost my ability to sense him?

One Good Friday, in my young and ignorant soul, I wondered if Jesus had felt like I now felt when he cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” With the trees of North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama, I’d lost God’s consolation, and I didn’t know why.

It would be a long, long time before I’d be sure of God’s presence again. I can’t say I’m certain of why even now. Nevertheless, I learned this: There is something much worse than living in a world without trees, and that is living in a world without God. And that is reason enough for me.

Through the prophet Isaiah (chapter 55), God said, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” His ways are better than mine.

My heart feels as though it’s filled with lead when I look out to our treeless street and the treeless street beyond it. No shade for the windows. No verdant curtains to soften the jumbled angles of tract homes, one after the other.

But this time, God’s consolation hasn’t been uprooted with the trees. I read more of what he said through Isaiah, and I trust it’s true.

When the time comes for him to make all things new, as he said he will, “instead of the thorn bush, the cypress will come up and instead of the nettle, the myrtle will come up,” a memorial to the Lord.

Perhaps, too, instead of desert and tumbleweeds, there will be woods and groves of sweet gum and sassafras, slippery elm and shortleaf pine, dogwood and chinaberry, mimosa and magnolia.

Through Isaiah, God said, “The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy ? and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” I look forward to shouting and clapping with them.

Soon the city will plant a sapling, hardly as tall as me, where our ficus used to be. God willing, I’ll live long enough to see it become a tree.