Trees Of Life

When I said that I would be spending last week in a little cabin in the big woods, I meant really big woods.

We helped our daughter and her family move to California, and then we did something that I have always wanted to do. We went to Sequoia National Park, home of the giant redwoods. How big are they? Well, the one named “General Sherman” is the largest living thing in the world. It’s 35 feet in diameter and is as tall as a football field. And, even more astounding to me, is that it’s 2,200 years old. It was a sapling two centuries before Jesus was born. And it’s still alive, still growing. It adds the equivalent mass of a regular 60 foot tree every year.

And there are whole groves of these giant trees up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I treasure things that are sublime–overwhelming, awe-inspiring, so vast that you can’t take them all in–like the Grand Canyon, Niagra Falls, and these trees.

What intrigues me most about them is that they are virtually immortal. They can be killed, of course, cut down as many stupidly have been and sometimes they get so tall that they topple, but they don’t die of old age. I wonder how that can be. Every other earthly creature, whether plant or animal or human, lives for awhile but eventually its cells get exhausted, entropy sets in, aging manifests its symptoms, and eventually the organism dies.

Why don’t the giant redwoods? General Sherman is not even the oldest of these trees. Some are 3,000 years old, from the time of the Trojan War and King David. And redwoods are not even the oldest species. A bristlewood pine in the White Mountains of California–somewhere else I want to go–is 4,700 years old. A young earth creationist would put that as being right after the Flood! Perhaps these evergreen trees are somehow not implicated in the Fall. Perhaps they are some kind of remnant or sign of the Tree of Life.

What are some other sublime sights and experiences? A tornado, the ocean, the Rocky Mountains–I’ve seen those. I’ve seen Mt. St. Helens, but I think I need to see an active volcano. Outer Space. And God, of course, and the things of God. The sublimities of nature and of art–Paradise Lost, Bach’s music, Michaelangelo’s paintings and sculptures–give us pleasure, according to Ruskin, because they point to Him.