The Orchard Rosary: Christianity as Cosmic Liturgy

Sunset.

A choir of blackbirds sings in the cottonwoods.

A cloister of turkey vultures circles the stone pines.

A friary of wild turkeys patrols the garden.

Holy Week. This year has been quite an amazing journey, as I have spent weeks at a time with Catholic monks up and down the West Coast. These experiences have not only served as rich research experience, but as abundant nourishment for my soul. As the sun catches the earth at its midpoint between winter and summer today in the Vernal Equinox, I want to share an experience I had with a walnut tree at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina California at the beginning of Lent.

Crunching dried walnut tree leaves underfoot, I walked the perimeter of Saint Peter’s; an orchard block planted in tight rows of naked, still walnut trees. The season of lent has shifted the chanting of the monks into a sombre tone. Turkey vultures circle the Abbey Cloister, forming small crosses in the sky. I thimbled a wooden rosary in my right hand, stumbling through the mostly memorized prayers, my mind wandering, returning every few moments to gentle rhythms of…’Hail Mary full of grace…’ Eventually, I stopped in front of a walnut tree, much like the thousand others, only this one formed the wobbly shape of a cross. Despite an unseasonably warm February, its branches were still bare.

In the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary we meditate on the last hours of Christ’s life before he brutally murdered by the Romans. I don’t usually dwell on this gruesome torture scene, but during Lent I try to spend more time with the Suffering Jesus. It is not always comfortable.

Staring into the pale furrowed bark of this silent tree however, I suddenly saw the scene in a new way. Jesus on the cross, is not just a bleeding traitor who became the Savior. There is a cosmic aspect to Christ, that which inter-penetrates the entire Universe. He is here before me in these skinny branches. Taking one of the buds in between my thumb and fingers, I can see that the bud is beginning to swell. The sap is beginning to flow, the tree is silently, invisibly preparing for Resurrection.

If we spend too much time on the suffering and death, we can forget resurrection and life. Sometimes I feel like the Church perpetually worships the Christ of this winter tree: naked and bare; forgetting that spring will surely come. Soon this walnut tree’s buds will burst with pale green leaves, soon the entire 350 acre walnut and plum orchard will become green and white with vitality, soon the entire valley will be alive with spring.

The Cosmic Christ is present in all the ways that life through death generates more life–the naked branch of the tree that silently gathers and then sends forth life. Even our short lives which seem to end at death, give birth in a thousand other ways through the people we love, the things we do, and the changes we seek to make.

The Christian telling of the story of Easter, deeply rooted in Ostara a Germanic Goddess of the Dawn, begins with Mary the fertile soil, continues through her Child the inevitable seed, rises in Yeshua the maturing fruit, ripens into Christ crucified, the dormant tree of life, and culminates with the Cosmic Christ resurrected with the spring of new green life.

Standing in the still orchard, it struck me with simple peace: If Christ is God in the World, then the World is Christic. When we pray to Christ, we are praying to God through the World.

The walnut tree, like the entire world, is then an icon of Christ, and these Glorious Mysteries, the underlying pattern of the entire cosmos, were right there with me in that humble orchard planted by Trappist monks. This year, the Story of the Paschal Mystery feels even more deeply rooted in the story of the Universe: Life, Death and Resurrection.

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