Driving north from Ohio into Michigan one finds that the land is table-top flat, with the fertile look of the stereotypical midwestern landscape, though with more trees than farther west. About an hour into Michigan, around Ann Arbor, the land begins to change, acquiring an undulating roll and breaking out, here and there, into hills which, though steep, are low by any but midwestern standards. Those who have studied these things call these hills moraines and explain that they are the piles of gravel and debris pushed forward by the glaciers and mark the extent of the glaciers icy range. These low hills, along with the hundreds of scattered lakes and ponds also gouged out by the glaciers, made up the landscape of my childhood and youth. It is a gently beautiful part of the world, green and lovely in the summer, white and stark in the long winter, though Im afraid its beauty might evade those used to the more dramatic vistas of the west or the Appalachians.
I grew up on the edge of a little town which rested at the foot of one of these morainal ranges, called the Tyrone Hills by the homesick Irishmen who settled them. North of my town the rich flatlands of the Saginaw Valleybroken here and there by factory townsstretched out a hundred miles to meet the wooded uplands of the Ogomaw Hills, another range of moraines where a later glacier had ceased its march.
The Tyrone Hills, unlike the surrounding lowlands, are not good farmland. There are, however, well-suited for fruit growing, especially apples, and at one time the area was rich in orchards. There are still a few of these operating, where orchardmen were blessed with sons who were sensible enough to see that right livelihood is more rewarding than the fast track to yuppiedom. More fell into disuse, unpruned and unpicked, and some were cleared out for the housing developments that destroyed so much of the lost world of my childhood.
At the entrance to one of these old orchards, still being worked, though not, in the eyes of the old orchardmen Ive talked to, worked well, towered a huge and ancient sugar maple tree. One whole section of it rose bare and scarred, testimony to some long ago lightning strike. Its appearance was thus somewhat bedraggled, though this somehow added to its grandeur, the way the limp from an old war would might make an aged warrior even more dignified.
What I most remember about this old maple, though, is that it was always the first tree in the area to change the color of its leaves. In the first weeks of August a fringe of brilliant red would begin to form on its outer fingertips and soon the whole of the old giant was transformed into scarlet, flaming beauty. This while the rest of the world, and the other maples greenly went about the business of summer.
I remember this vividly from childhood: my friends and I immersed in High Summerriding bikes out to Tipsico Lake, playing baseball, reading comic books in the leafy green light of our tree fort, sitting beneath a peach tree with sweet and sticky peach juice running down our chins, and every time we passed the old maple we faced the stark reminder that our days were numbered. Soon we would be sitting bored in school, yoked by the navy blue ties of our parochial uniforms. Soon the grey winter would descend. And soon, though this was beyond the reach of my ten-year-old imagination, boyhood would pass and we would be thrown into the tangle of adolescence.
I have thought often of this old wounded tree, and in the many years since I first observed its untimely warnings it has come to signify much in my personal symbolic landscape. I think of other persons and phenomena which, perhaps because of their very woundedness, sense the turning of seasons and the approaching night, as out of step with their fellows as the old maple was with his brother maples.
The old tree is, first, a symbol of the spiritual call of prophecy. I think of Jeremiah prophesying exile and destruction to Jerusalem while his fellows, like modern-day televangelists, prophesied prosperity and peace: Jeremiah, wounded and lamenting (and continuing to prophesy) from his muddy cistern. Or Elijah, that most fiery and bold of the prophets, reduced to fear and self-pity as he fled for his life, yet still refusing to compromise.
I think, too, of Walker Percys statement that the artist in the post-modern world is like the canary in the mineshaft: a bit more sensitive to the poison in the air, he begins to ail and flap around while the miners are still oblivious to their danger. This, in Dr. Percys estimation, explains why so much modern art is dark and disturbing.
But the prophet and the artist are, to varying degrees, conscious of the signifying process they are involved in, though some artists seem not only like sick but disturbed canaries and appear to enthusiastically celebrate their own death throes and those of the culture.
There are, however, those who are no more conscious of their role than the old maple was of his. I think particularly of societal and cultural phenomena, movements and trends which merit close attention from Christians, yet are often ignored or even mocked. These movements are instances of unreflective response, of people and groups of people just doing what comes naturally, just reacting, who because of their very woundedness may sense change in the air long before the societal mainstream gets a whiff of it.
The poor, especially the urban poor, seem a very obvious example of this. In their vulnerability they manifest the sickness of the age long before it shows up in the more insulated lives of the middle class and the wealthy. Yet a survey of the last few decades shows that time and again the symptoms which appear among the urban poor sooner or later begin to appear in the wealthier strata of the culture. Whether we look to drug abuse, the breakdown of sexual and familial mores, or the popularity of angry and vulgar forms of musical expression, time and again these things are first seen in the inner cities. And time and again they are ignored by the middle and upper classes, and too often by the leadership of the local Church. Such things are far away, involving people distant from us if not geographically, at least economically, culturally, and racially. And though the commandment of charity ought to impel us to bridge these gaps and reach out in concern there is also a strong element of self-interest here. If some sort of unhealthy behavior is destroying lives in Watts or the South Bronx today, it will almost certainly hit the children of the privileged classes in a few years. There is a pattern here, and we ought to pay attention. For example, if my thesis is correct we can expect to seeand in fact there are already indications of thisgrowing incidences of young people carrying firearms and using them for the most trivial of reasons, not only in the inner cities but in the suburbs. After all, the ghetto and suburbia are morally equivalent. The same forcesmaterialism, instant gratification, love of violence, fearfuel both worlds. It is in the lives of the poor that the deadly effects of these forces first and most violently manifest themselves, but the dark fruition of the culture of death proceeds at different paces wherever the Way of Death prevails.
Ideological and spiritual movements, too, often signify coming societal changes and are worthy of our attention. Much has been made over the years of Pope John XXIIIs admonition to read the signs of the times and while it has been argued that Good Pope John, like many innocent souls, himself misread the signs of his own times, that does not excuse our own negligence. We hear, too, of the Catholic moment for America, the idea that the culture is ripe for Catholic insight and guidance. While many of us suspect that what the neoconservatives really intend is more along the lines of an American moment for the Catholic Church, the Churchs big chance to conform to the American capitalist mythos, there can be no denying that some historic moments are riper for spiritual awakening then others. I personally suspect that the real Catholic moment occurred in the sixties. I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if there had been barefoot friars hitchhiking around America and preaching in the parks and at the festivals of the late sixties. It was a time of great spiritual ferment and hunger, but the friars all seemed to put aside their habits and head for encounter groups and endless seminars, so the seekers looked elsewhere, to the East, or simply gave up and returned to the mainstream. The moment, like most, passed us by.
The time may again be ripe, I dont know. But I dont see a lot of insightful analysis, or even interest among Catholics in regard to contemporary movements. Too many on the right are content with smug rejection, while those on the left seem too often eager to sign up uncritically with whatever trend comes along.
A recent instance which has been gaining some attention in the national press is the so-called mens movement. While it is not a mass movement by any means, significant numbers of men are signing up for seminars and weekends that include such things as drumming, face painting, and generally whooping it up in the woods. Masculinity, they say, has been denied in the technological culture and belittled by feminists and it is time for men to get back in touch with the roots of maleness. The more innocuous aspects of this rapprochement sound a lot like the way I spent my boyhood, and it has occurred to me that perhaps these are guys who grew up in a more urban or suburban environment than I, who never had a chance to connect with the savage who is just beneath the surface in every boy. Other aspects of the trend are a bit spookier, such as the report that at one gathering the men called on Hepwa, the African god of deep masculinity.
While some trendy Catholic men may be dancing around a fire somewhere even as I write this, the reaction of most Catholics has been dismissal and ridicule. To those called, in the words of Vatican II, to enter into the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the world, this is an inadequate response.
Yes, I will grant that many of the actions of the mens movement appear to be ridiculous, and I will grant that most men are not likely to be running around in a loincloth anytime soon. But most women did not burn their bras in the sixties and seventies, either. Yet the movement initiated by the handful of angry women who did burn their bras has transformed our society and I doubt there is anyone who has not been affected, for good or ill, by that movement. Those women and their extremist antics largely met ridicule and dismissal in the sixties, yet they were tapping into what proved to be a deep reservoir of alienation in the population at large. Similarly, I would suggest that when, in the most technologically sophisticated society ever developed, groups of educated men take off their ties, leave their desks, and head for the woods for a weekend of primitive hoopla we had better all pay attention. This may be one of those unseasonal warnings that something is deeply wrong.
The mens movement is, after all, part of a larger move toward paganism and nature worship on the part of New Age and other seekers. Again, Christian reaction has largely been mockery (or panic). But such movements are indicative of inchoate human yearnings in the face of unprecedented dehumanization and ought to be viewed with some sympathy. Of course, there is absurdity and grave spiritual danger in the paths these seekers are taking. (What if, for example, Hepwa actually shows up?) But at least there is enough life in these people to make them dissatisfied. As someone once said where theres alienation theres hope. To be at home in the modern world is to be in deeper trouble than even the fellow pounding his drum by the firelight.
These clumsy strivings need to be addressed and guided by the followers of Christ. But merely to say that is to be aware of why it rarely occurs to the alienated to turn to Christians for guidance: the public representatives of Christianity are for the most part scoundrels and buffoons these days, and with some notable exceptions (Mother Teresa, John Paul II) hardly models of wholeness. We Christians, whose lives should manifest great depth and beauty too often manifest, instead, the more shallow and tawdry elements of the culture, even in the liturgy, though we are heirs of a tremendous inheritance. In fact, the confused neo-pagan may be more in touch, on an intuitive level, with the disease of modernity than the smug Christian who, thinking he has it all together, may in fact be an artificial creature in whom the seed of Gods word can never bear fruit because, in the parables image, the soil is too shallow. This is, after all, the age of Christian theme parks and shopping malls, of heavy metal churches and the Businessmans Bible (which I saw advertised recently). Like the wounded tree sensing the shortening of the days, those we may be inclined to dismiss as kooks may, in their confused way, be warning us of a shadow that has entered our own souls.
This is not, of course, the way it should be. We who profess Christ bearor ought to bearthe most Wounded Tree of all: the Cross of Christ. Upon this tree all that was human was lifted to the Father. All that was lost, alienated and separated from God was reconciled in the body of the Incarnate God who, entering into humanity, gave all that is human the potential to, as St. Peter said, partake in the divine. We, bearing this mystery, this burden and treasure, ought to reach out to humanity with the broad embrace of those arms stretched out against the sky to embrace all the wounded, to draw them to the Wounded Tree where healing dwells.
