Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
While I was home at my parents’ house for Thanksgiving break, I found my old, marked-up copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and started re-reading it. In the context of late November’s short, dark days, cold winds, and commercial transformation, I couldn’t help seeing Annie’s concept of “the tree with the lights in it” in a holiday-tinged hue. Everywhere, neighbors and shops and city parks were literally bedecking trees of all shapes and sizes with LEDs and incandescents - sometimes even holding tree-lighting ceremonies. As always, my favorites were those with white lights so tightly-packed and meticulously strung that it was as if the bulbs were a natural part of their anatomy: trees made of needles and sap and tiny seeds of light.
It is clear from Pilgrim Annie’s view that the tree with the lights in it is more than just a tree, however. I know she would shudder at any attempt to directly decode her symbol, but I must know: is it the divine? Her own temperate-climate version of the burning bush? Is it instead the unifying force of nature, an energy normally obscured but in one heaven-rent moment made visible? Or is it just revelation alone - not God, nature, or humanity per se, but just a new sight, granted ephemerally to an open, hungry mind?
In some ways, of course, the tree with the lights in it is all of these things. Painted on the backdrop of the last few weeks, though, the tree has struck me most poignantly as an image of clarity. I’ve been resonating with this other passage of Annie’s from Pilgrim:
A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across the air in dark shreds. So I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity.I am in an all-too-familiar state of having more questions than answers. I feel like I am stumbling blindly through life, contracting a lot of bruises on the way, and crying out for help without much hope of a response. I have been dumped in a foreign land with no map, forced on stage with no script, handed a pile of lumber but no blueprints. I am frustrated.
It is Advent again - the time when for a few short weeks, the rest of the world starts to acknowledge the painful waiting I’ve been experiencing all year. The people of the church come together and groan expectantly, singing the minor-key carols that speak to us through the liminal fog, uttering words of hope to a tune of not-yet-here. We try to prepare the way for the tree with the lights in it. We tear at the blinders on our eyes and pray, palms open and desperate, to receive our daily bread of Truth. Our Answer awaits, if only he would go and get himself born!
I’m not sure what the lesson here should be. I wish I could tell you that I’d had a recent encounter with the Tree of Clarity - that like Annie, I’d been “lifted,” “struck,” “knocked breathless by a powerful glance.” Sorry, friend. No revelations here. I do believe in the tree with the lights in it, though. One of its distant cousins is sitting on the bookshelf in my living room, two feet tall, cut down in New Hampshire, hung with quirky ornaments, and crowned with a gold star cut from shiny wrapping paper. She serves as a reminder that Annie’s tree is out there - that hope does not disappoint.
In many ways, the good news, Emmanuel, will not come on December 25th. Sometimes a bit of clarity only serves to show us the full extent of the darkness we inhabit. When I escaped the city a few weeks ago and camped under the unobstructed sky of Big Sur state park in California, there were so many stars that I couldn’t recognize a single familiar constellation. It was a humbling, breathless beauty that I needed, that healed, that I hungrily swallowed from the spoon of the creator. But it was a question answered by a million other questions, and Christmas, I think, is similar. On that silent night, holy night, we sing because thanks to - or in spite of - our present reality, we believe in the tree with the lights in it. We pray for a glimpse, even for one stolen second, of the world lit up as it was meant to be.
