There was a tree I climbed almost daily during the years we lived in our small ranch house in a small college town. It was the perfect tree with low branches that conveniently spread wide over a chain link fence that allowed for easy access. I spent hours in that tree alone with my imagination and a book. I carved my initials into her trunk, christened her with a name I no longer remember, and curled myself into her crooked boughs. Alone in my tree, my mind wandered with a million thoughts and made up stories. I’d sing and talk to myself, talk to God. In the safety of the tree, against soft, sun-kissed bark, I could allow my mind to roam. I could say the things clanging for space in my muddled mind. I could dream, hope, imagine. I’ve long been plagued by racing thoughts and sometimes crippling fears. At night, I’d lay in bed praying the same words on repeat like a childish liturgy, my body wracked with constant fear from every bump in the night, thunderstorm, or mention of hell in Sunday School. But in the morning, after rushing through schoolwork, I’d escape to my tree. She was the impetus for imagination in my still forming mind.
.
It was the 1990’s, before the rise of streaming services and iPads and smartphones. We watched PBS every afternoon and rollerbladed down neighborhood hills. We ate pretzels and pretended they were cigars. We rented Disney movies at Blockbuster, and attended Sunday School on Sunday mornings, complete with felt story boards and animal crackers. My youthful, impressionable mind possessed creative thoughts about God, unconcerned with the theology that would later confine me. I was decades away from any understanding of what it means to wrestle with God, let alone deconstruct foundational beliefs. I possessed a child-like faith that eventually dimmed with age, the unbridled courage to speak freely knowing my secret mutterings would be kept safe by my tree friend.
.
Culture makes allowances for childish imagination with the expectation kids will have imaginary friends and entertain themselves with just their voices and a tree. But as we age, our growing minds often begin to misplace imagination and curiosity for absolute answers and certain convictions. My child-like faith conflicted with the oughts of a Christian life. I accepted Bible stories at face value, but found prayer confusing. Overwhelmed by so many fears, I prayed constantly but God felt like an absent deity. My literal understanding told me prayer and Bible reading was sufficient for spiritual flourishing. Perhaps it’s the reason I didn’t find solace in morning devotions or a robust prayer life, but alone in a tree where spiritual formation happened more in wandering imagination than rigidity.
I witnessed goodness within the majestic nature of plunging roots and vibrant leaves and outstretched boughs. If a single tree was declared to be very good, I wondered if I was also very good. But on Sunday mornings, I learned of my wretchedness, my propensity for corruption, my vile sin nature. I craved beauty like Ferdinand in the field, but my mind began thinking far too much on the idea of hell and a burgeoning certainty I was heading for it.
When actions are policed and teachings focus extensively on human corruption and wretchedness, it leads to a certain kind of literal theology stripped of wonder or imagination. It lays the specifics out in black and white and gives little leeway for questioning. In God in Search of Man, Abraham Heschel says we cannot divorce God from humanity. If humanity is created in the image of God, then humanity contains within itself remnants of the divine. And within God’s created order, we catch glimpses, moments of wonder not necessarily obvious or literal but there all the same. The act of sitting in a tree, asking questions, talking gibberish to God can be a holy thing. And it wouldn’t have happened without imagination, something I began to lose with each birthday bit by bit…
.
One stormy morning, I woke to flashes of lightning and heavy rain beating against the bedroom window. I wandered into the kitchen, warmed by the soft oven light against the darkness of a raging storm. It was the kind of storm that had terrified me since my earliest memories, that sent me into a fetal position in the center of the room (away from the windows), had me counting the seconds between thunder claps, praying for God’s forgiveness in case this was the end.
My mom told me the news with compassion. She knew what the tree had meant to me, the hours I’d spent sitting, climbing, imagining. It felt like the death of an era, the death of a safe haven, a trusted friend left in ruin, split by the lightning that terrified me to no end. My beautiful tree was dead, and with her, perhaps, my imagination. Where else would I retreat to? Who else could I entrust with my wild thoughts and feebling prayers? For me, this tree had embodied a God who seemed absent. Writer and poet Wendell Berry writes of “the peace of wild things,” a peace I’d known best within the wild thing growing tall over our backyard fence. I grieved the loss.
.
Through the years, I’ve assimilated, faltered and questioned, wandered and deconstructed my faith. I haven’t climbed any trees in a while and for a very long time, my imagination was stagnant, nearly nonexistent, just the tiniest ember waiting for life to be breathed back into it. For many years, I didn’t understand the link between imagination and faith, the significance of holy curiosity birthed in childhood. In many ways, spiritual deconstruction reignited my dormant imagination. It offered permission to think beyond the boxes I’d been confined to, and return again to the safety of a tree long gone but still remembered, finding joy and renewal in the wonder of creation.
.
These days, I dream of planting seeds and growing new trees to befriend future children brimming with their own stories. We all need special places, rooted friends, vestiges of divine love to remind us that, sometimes, God is not so much in the routine, the attendance, the 30 minute devotionals, or corporate church settings, but in stillness, in solitude, in the simple beauty of an ancient tree. For these are the unexpected places where imagination is birthed. These are the places we first see God.
This is beautiful ❤️