I read an article recently on the Wall Street Journal titled “Why a Tree is the Friend We Need Right Now”. I found much to be commended in the article, and while reading it, I experienced that thrill one gets when encountering the expression of thoughts that once ran around in more shadowy form in one’s own mind. I thought about sharing the article, but I was hesitant. I had an inkling of why I was hesitant, but I had to think more deeply to grasp it thoroughly.

Ultimately, there were two primary reasons that I deliberated about sharing it. One was just the weirdness factor. Not that I mind being weird. I am weird in many respects, and I quite like the ways in which I am weird. But I also am careful about how I express my weirdness. I have no desire to be weird for weirdness’s sake. When people encounter something in me that they perceive as unusual, I want to feel like I’m in control (knowing I can’t ever fully be), and that what they perceive matches my own reasons for being a certain way. Sharing the article would come with a risk, in my mind, of projecting particular kinds of weirdness that I would not ascribe to myself.

The other reason is similar, but it is specifically in regard to my faith. As a Christian, I am naturally guarded about ideas that veer into pantheistic thinking, and an article like this could be perceived as such. To be clear, I had no personal problem in reading it. It wasn’t a fear of heretical ideas seeping into my subconscious or something like that. Any decent reader should be capable of picking the meat and discarding the bones. The issue was specifically what sharing the article might foster in my friends’ perceptions of my faith.

This second reason was, I think, the larger of the two, and I want to home in on it. As I continued to mull it over, the real revelation for me was that my hang-up wasn’t about the content of the article. What I was really perceiving was that there is a weak spot in the way many Christians think about nature. We are indeed required by our faith to reject the notion that the natural world is itself divine and a proper object of worship; such a notion is in direct contradiction to the core tenet that God is the creator of everything. Additionally, we are encouraged in Scripture to see God’s creation as revealing aspects of who he is. But nowhere are we forbidden to also admire the natural world for its own qualities. We are often so quick to see all of nature as an allegory about the qualities of God, that it may cause us to overlook the beauty of the thing itself. And if we do look upon the beauty of the thing itself with awe and admiration, we may worry that we are slipping into idolatry.

So, going back to the article about “befriending” a tree — it should be no wonder that in a tree, one might find many of the qualities of God: the lordliness of its stature, the awe over its sheer size and age, the steadfastness of its trunk, the kindness of its shade, the generosity of its outstretched branches, the splendor of its ramage, the fear of it being greater than our ability to comprehend it. The prophet Daniel likened the Kingdom of God to such (Daniel 4:10–12), which Jesus also alluded to in one of his parables (Luke 13:19).

Here we come to the real crux of my point though. Earlier I said that Christians have a weak spot in this area. What I mean by that is something like a dearth of appreciation for the value God might place on his creation beyond what it specifically reveals to us about him. For the same God whose glory is declared by the heavens, tames the incomprehensible Leviathan (Job 41). A tree can indeed stand as a symbol of many qualities of God, but we perhaps too readily reduce such things to being merely a medium. If they are merely a medium, then their value is contingent upon how they are understood (or not understood) by other minds. Then they are like the ink and paper with which poems are written. A tree is not (ironically) the paper or the ink but the poem itself! We see in Genesis 1 that God called all of his creation good. It was good independently of (and prior to) other minds beholding it.

If we reduce all good things to being only mediums of understanding the Ultimate Good, that’s actually, in a way, a more pantheistic mode of thinking. All reality is then essentially subsumed into being part of God’s mind. But in the Christian view, God created realities distinct from himself. And because God created things distinct from himself, we must believe that their distinction from God is an essential part of their goodness. A tree, like a poem or a novel, communicates things about its creator, but it is simultaneously alive and breathing with its own existence. I was enthralled recently by a discovery that the word fiction comes from an old root word that referred to acts such as building, kneading, or forming from clay. We ourselves, along with the rest of creation, are, in a sense, God’s fiction. And when we create good fiction, it somehow bears the imprints of our souls while also not being self-absorbed. The “separating out” is part of what makes it good, just like sea and dry land. It is about more than just ourselves. I would assert that the same is true of creation. It bears God’s imprint, but it is not a hall of divine mirrors. It communicates aspects of the divine, while also warranting admiration for its own distinct qualities.

So go ahead. Admire tree and God both, and let not man join together what God has divided.