Words, letters, ideas... They all come from somewhere: some from experience, some from a story you read or watched. Sometimes they’re not even yours; they belong to a family or a group.
An erasing is happening en masse. Some notice, but most don’t. Individuality, wonder, story. Even the ability to truly worship. We are losing them to a machine. And for a while I was a happy participant in the sweet oblivion of not seeing it.
It started long ago with a tree in a garden and, a woman who wanted and a man who needed.
It’s gone on since then in different iterations. The tree in the garden was hidden, but the serpent found other ways to fabricate it. Every age has had its own tree, and we are all drawn to it.
It’s not racist or sexist; it doesn’t profile you or your status in society. It just stands there. It doesn’t even speak. We look at it and project speech onto it. Sometimes the voice we hear back is our own. Most of the time, it is.
But sometimes it’s something else, old and wicked in a way that we don’t fully understand.
That is what makes it all so appealing. No cherubs with fiery swords guard this tree. It stands there; we see it; we desire it. And we will spend a whole life trying to get to it, to taste its fruits.
Some will try to go a step further and find a way to grow their own. They will spend decades trying and failing to tend dead soil, trying to bring something to life that was never alive.
The few who have, by hook or by crook, gotten close to it, maybe even touched it, never leave it. They become absorbed into it. Their silent screams are not heard. Their warnings never leave its branches.
It’s not alive. It’s not even real.
And yet it calls to us, and we answer.
There is another tree. It’s not appealing. In fact, it stinks. A putrid, vile odor. It’s got nothing on its leaves, and no fruit. It’s full of splinters and rough, sharp angles. Flies and birds and rodents scurry around it. At its base is something dark and wet; it turns the dirt into something I know not.
But this tree is different. Men and women despise it. Children are strangely drawn to it, but their parents teach them to turn away, to despise it, to scorn it as they would some old, bearded, dirty pedophile on a bench in a park. They teach them to go after the other tree.
But every so often, a man or a woman at their wits’ end feels that drawing, that compulsion, toward the vile tree. And they begin to walk toward it. Their friends, if they have any, will fight tooth and nail to stop them. Same with family. But like an addict in a haze, they persist.
Why?
Nothing about this tree is like the other. But still they walk.
I see one man. He is a sluggard and a man drunk on the vices and joys of his country. He is alone, yet there is a ring on his finger.
I see him. He has been beaten severely. His skull is cracked. He will likely die soon if he receives no help.
I see him crawling toward this tree. Fingers gripping the dirt, fighting against the gnats and flies.
He finally reaches the tree. He touches it. He doesn’t care what’s at the base, or about the stink. He collapses with a word in his mouth.
“Help.”
And something hard to put into words happens. He doesn’t hear a voice from some wicked thing or from himself. He feels a touch, an embrace, as he is lifted to his feet.
His head no longer hurts. He looks into eyes of such intensity that fire barely compares. It’s horrifying yet beautiful. It’s like being pushed off a cliff into the darkest pit you’ve ever seen and, at the same time, lying down on the most comfortable bed you’ve ever known.
Someone speaks, calling him by his name in a way he has never heard it called.
And then pure white...
I don’t want us to forget how to wonder or how to worship. That’s part of why I write The Biblical Man. If this work matters to you, stand behind it. Become a paid subscriber.
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