This reflection is dedicated to Catherine Brennan SSL for her embodiment of the vision of Eco-Congregation Ireland.
In early summer I looked out the window to see the apple tree crowned in blossom. What came to me then was the assurance of the mystics that God reveals God’s self in the tree as tree, in the blossom as blossom.
So as we recognise in the apple tree a sister or mother made with the same loving care as we are, we are also somehow aware that in this encounter we are in the presence of the God of creation.
Though everything is woven into everything else, more often than not, our seeing can be destructive and dismissive as we look upon the natural world, in Tom Berry’s phrase, not as ‘a communion of subjects but as a collection of objects.’ In other words, when we don’t applaud the tree for its very being which is beyond our comprehension.
Of course we can buy apples in a plastic bag in any supermarket but that they connect to the apple tree in flower escapes us. We are mostly consumers and less often celebrants of creation attending to the voices and multi-presences of God.
The Irish poet, Joseph Mary Plunkett, was not being sentimental when he wrote; ‘I see his face in every flower. The thunder and the singing of the birds are but his voice’. It might take us longer to appreciate that ‘rocks are his written words’ until, with the help of a geologist like John Feehan, we learn to recognise in them the living text of ‘God’s old diaries’!