Tree at the Center of the World?
The following excerpts express some of the reasons why BCM has adopted the oak tree as its logo (from Ched Myers’ Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians, Orbis Books, 1994, chapter eleven).
Second Isaiah, a prophet of exile who knew the pain of displacement, beckoned his people to join the hymn of Yahweh’s sovereignty: an ancient love song for the vineyard.
- Sing to Yahweh a new song of praise from the ends of the earth!
- Let the sea roar and all that fills it the coastlands and all their inhabitants.
- Let the desert and its towns lift up their voice… (Is 42:10f).
This biblical intimation that the land sings its own songs may be more than poetic. Bruce Chatwin has written about how traditional Aborigines find their way across the vast distances of the Australian outback by learning its “songlines” – chants associated with sacred sites and other distinctive characteristics of the land.
Is it possible that such songlines exist in every place? If so, we–the dis-placed and displacing, ever trying to control and contain the land with topographical maps, surveyors sticks and ideologies of ownership–have not had ears to hear them. Chief Sealth Suquamish once warned that European Americans would forever be haunted by the spirits of those who dwelt here before us on Great Turtle Island: “At night, when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and deserted, they will throng with the host that once filled, and still love, this land; the white man will never be alone.”
Is it possible that such spirits do indeed dwell here? If so, we whose past has been devised and dismembered have not had eyes to see them. I am convinced that these beliefs, which lie at the heart of traditional culture, not only reflect the truth of Great Turtle Island, but also represent an ultimatum to Christians. Will we continue to ignore the songlines and to excommunicate the spirits of the land in which we dwell? Or can we learn to hear the earthsong of God’s praise, and see the spirits of the great “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1)?
I am a social product of the forces of urban alienation. Nevertheless, the love in this land has summoned in me a love for it. This love was buried in my soul like the smallest of seeds, placed there by ancestors I never knew. The nights and days of my life have passed and the seed has grown, “I know not how” (Mk 4:27). The more that seed comes to flower, the more I believe that a truly contextual theology must pay attention not only to history and to social location, but to the songlines of the land. It was, after all, the land from which and for which we were created (Gen 1:26; 2:7). The task of re-placed theology is to reclaim symbols of redemption that are indigenous to the bioregion in which the church dwells, to remember the stories of the peoples of the land, and to sing anew its old songs. These can be woven together with the symbols, stories and songs of biblical radicalism.
Rudolfo Anaya writes: “The tree, or the tree of life, is a dominant symbol of the Americas, and its syncretic image combines the tree of Quetzalcoatl and the cross of Christ. My ancestors nourished the tree of life; it is up to me to care for all it symbolizes.” This is a compelling analogy. Just as the cross keeps Christian faith rooted in the practice of discipleship and solidarity with the marginalized, so can the Tree of Life keep us rooted in the soil of beloved places. Just as the cross takes differing forms in varying contexts, so will the Tree of Life differ from bioregion to bioregion. In Arizona it might be the saguaro cactus, in northern California, the redwood, and in Baja, the yucca. But in central and southern California, the Tree of Life is most assuredly the oak tree.
California is home to nine species of oak trees (genus Quercus). They occur from the Oregon border to Baja California, found on offshore islands, along the coast, and throughout the foothills, valleys and mountains of the state’s interior. The noble Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia), with its magnificent gnarled and spreading architecture, is the species I know and love best, since it is widespread in our coastal plains, from protected bluffs to inland arroyos and foothills. To “read” the oak is to understand the land and people of this place; it is thus a theological text. What might a teologia de los robles look like?
No matter how far one digs through the cultural-historical strata of this place, the oak is always there. The human history of California began in the shade of her native oaks. Acorn foods sustained many diverse Indigenous cultures that evolved and thrived among the woodlands for centuries… It is not surprising that oaks were revered by native Californians, held sacred in elaborate acorn ceremonies, and depicted as symbols of fertility, strength, and oneness with the earth. Acorns, much more nutritious than basic European foodstuffs, represented the staple of the Indigenous diet in most places, where economic life centered on gathering and storing them. Acorns were second only to salt among the food items most frequently traded among native Californians, and were used as well for medicine, dyes, toys and music. Acorns represented to some tribes the Ikxareyavs (“Spirit People”), and were present in ritual life from birth (some clans tied an infant’s umbilical chord to the branches of an oak) to death (mourners were purified by the smoke of oak boughs and painted with acorn ash).
What was here for the Indian was here for the colonizing Spaniard. When Sebastian Vizcaino, the mariner who surveyed Alta California in 1602, landed at Monterey in December, his party held the first Mass in this place under the shade of a huge oak. A large, deep cross was cut into the tree’s trunk, which in effect became the Pacific coast equivalent of Plymouth Rock. This same tree was visited again in 1770 by Junipero Serra, who again celebrated Mass under its branches. The Spaniards seemed to revere these oaks, reflected in many place-names. Hugh Thomas notes that in Basque political culture in Spain, “in the early Middle Ages, assemblies… would meet every two years under an oak tree at Guernica… [this] suggests a transference to political life of an ancient worship of the oak.” Tragically, such reverence was not shown by the Spanish for Indigenous Califonian culture. “Conquista” here for native communities meant forced relocation into the network of Franciscan Missions up and down the coast and servile labor, as well as disease and displacement.
Photo at right: Participants in the 2011 Bartimaeus Institute offer a circular hug around the massive trunk of the largest, oldest oak in our area alongside a seasonal creek in the foothills of the Los Padres National Forest. We called her “Grandmother Oak,” and often prayed and listened under her. She was destroyed in the Thomas Fire of 2017; a charred piece of her trunk sits in our yard, and is often used now as an altar.
The oaks were here for the invading Americans, too. Not too far from where I live now is a plaque commemorating a tree that no longer stands. Under the so-called “Oak of Peace,” it reads, General Andres Pico surrendered to Colonel John Fremont, ending the U.S. war with Mexico in 1847 and beginning the era of Federal occupation.
I grew up in an oak forest–that is, what was once an oak forest, before it was turned early in the 20th century into a suburban neighborhood. But many of the trees were preserved; homes were built around them, and streets were named Los Robles, Oak Knoll and Edgewood. The house of my childhood was surrounded by extraordinarily beautiful oaks; my mother tended them lovingly. I spent many hours gazing up at them and dreaming. But my neighborhood was, as I have said, a privileged exception. Because whatever else statehood has meant for California, it has brought a holocaust upon the native oaks. Our golden hills and dry valleys were stripped of these wonderful trees, first for firewood, then for construction materials, then for farming and grazing, and finally for housing developments.
Since the 1940s, California has lost more than one million acres of oak woodland as a result of rangeland clearing and agricultural conversion. Projections indicate that population growth–and the inevitable suburbanization that accompanies it–may claim another quarter million oak-covered acres by the year 2010. For every tree that is ripped out, we who live on this land become increasingly uprooted. The native oak is now an endangered species. If we lose this tree of life, the songlines will cease, and the land will die.
“The sacred tree at the center of the world.” This is what Bruce Barton called the cross planted by Fr. Serra in the oak-studded hills above San Diego in 1769. There is something deeply attractive about correlating the Indigenous tree of life with the cross. I imagine the oak as the new symbolic center for a re-placed church in California. But for this to be a redemptive, not merely a symbolic transformation, we Christians will need to go on a vision-quest back to that first communion under the Monterey oak. For there is still conquista in our bones, and not enough conscience at hand.
Hanging in my study is a photograph of an old Live Oak taken back in Tajiguas canyon north of Santa Barbara (site of the former Chumash village of Taxiwa), a place my family used to camp (left). Called by locals the “Indian tree,” one could still (in the 1960s) make out in its trunk two carved figures, thought to be a rendering of a Chumash neophyte receiving communion from a Spanish padre. It is one of the hauntings of colonization in this bioregion. Perhaps if Fray Serra and his descendants had understood and practiced a fundamental identification between cross and tree, rather than between cross and sword, the history of California would have been different. But that is not how it happened. And today, our colonized land is no more hospitable to Quercus agrifolia than it is to the via crucis.
In this land of the Western Gate, therefore, “whoever would follow Jesus must take up” the tree of life as well, the via roble. For the Great Economy is like an acorn which, though small, when pressed into the earth grows up and puts forth large branches. El roble sagrado al centro del mundo. By it we can practice mesticismo, and in its great canopy “all the birds of the air can find a nest.”