Remarks at Convocation
Andover Newton Theological School
September 17, 1997

Next to our home in the Smokies stands a majestic tulip poplar. Twenty feet around at the base, it climbs the sky with mighty arms stretching out more than thirty feet from the trunk until its head clears the ground at well over 100 feet. Three people couldn't hug around it arms outstretched. Our local arborist tells us it's the largest tulip poplar he's seen outside the Joyce Kilmer Forest near the Smokies Park. It's much older than the Republic. The Cherokees must have hunted around it in its youth.

The old timers tell us it was never logged because many years ago it was struck by lightning. A hollow runs down from its lower branches to its base, where roots like turkey toes claw deep into the rocky soil. Just below it a small spring emerges, feeding it even in the driest year.

Underneath its towering mass we clear the brush, pick blackberries in August, weed the driveway, and pass back and forth every day. Its patient beauty fills the window where I write and read and answer calls from people like Mary Luti, who wants to know if I will say a few words at the Convocation about Faith, Health and Spirituality. I only have a few minutes, she said, so it should be something personal.

Not my field. I'm in ethics, politics, economics -- abstract and impersonal public things. Besides, I'm the son of generations of Calvinists. Spirituality, like sex, is too private and confused to talk about. Anyway, thanks to grace, it doesn't affect God's attitude toward me, which is, after all, the thing that counts. And my faith...frankly it fluctuates between a dreamy utopianism and a dogged perseverance.

Health. That's another thing we shouldn't talk about, especially in public. It's pointless for us and boring for others. It's something to be handled by professional experts like doctors, nurses, and insurance companies.

I can't remember why she prevailed. All I can remember as I looked out at the tulip poplar was that my feet hurt and my back was all knotted up from a trip to Atlanta. Atlanta traffic will do that to you. I'm not asking for pity. Remember, I really am the son of Calvinists. But being a theologian I immediately had to ask, Why are my feet hurting and why is my back knotted up like a twisted cedar that's been in the wind too long? I really hurt, so I couldn't split those locust logs or work on the stone retaining wall I had so carefully designed during faculty meetings.

Having used up all my Calvinist restraint chips I finally called my doctor. He told me I had plantar fasciitis. How embarrassing - to have a liberal professor with fascist tendencies, even if they're only in his feet. Furthermore, he intoned with nuances of subtle compassion, standing around in Atlanta lecturing when I should have been lying under the tulip poplar had thrown my back out. He said he'd send me an instructional brochure. And try not to walk too much.

Immediately people started crawled out of the woodwork like Job's friends, telling their stories, sharing their remedies, exercises, names of massage therapists and recipes for herbal remedies, none of them containing ginseng or bourbon. The massage therapist was really great. She wore bib overalls, which made me feel comfortable. Her hands were very strong but I trusted her.

The tree told me: Now you might learn something - about roots that don't hit the ground right, about lightning, and about how to live because you have a hollow spot inside. You might even have a shot at wisdom. When you get up in front of those people up north, decked out in that ridiculous rooster plumage, you remind them about the lightning in their life, about the things that hurt where they touch life's ground, about the hollow places that spare us from ourselves, that let us live.

The tree wasn't finished. It had plenty of time. ...And you can tell them about what it means to have people come from thousands of miles away to cut you into pieces. They love to cut everything into little pieces - minds, bodies, souls, spirits, knowledge, land, work, time, and space... And then they send the pieces all over the world in order to put things back together in a different way. So that things and living creatures are all split up commuting, connecting, networking, hurrying every which way.

At that point I broke in with my burning question: But why do my feet hurt?
Then I heard the tulip tree say: They hurt because they aren't an instrument. They're you.

The tree was right, of course. How many ancestors had told me that my body was an instrument of my mind, my soul, my spirit? Wesley said: Be useful. Calvin said: Be an instrument of God. And back and back it went. The mind and soul were reasonable, they claimed. The body was a raging beast of passion. Tame it, discipline it, control it.

Over the centuries we came to think of this fleshy instrument as a kind of machine with replaceable parts. And because we thought of our bodies in instrumental terms we treated others, who served our bodies, as instruments. And we extended that to all the other creatures in the world as well. And so our world of instruments upon instruments not only can dominate the earth but turns back upon us, subjecting us to a world of mind over matter, of meetings over muscles, schedules over metabolism, typing and tapping over tendons and tissues. My new computer arrived in the summer, with a separate booklet almost as long as my chain saw's, warning me of the dire injuries it could inflict upon my carpal tunnels.

Crawling through the labyrinths of bureaucracy, piecing together the fragments of a life on turnpikes and elevators, we feel our muscles knotting, our tendons tearing, our heads splitting. And then there finally comes that painful time when we feel the lightning and touch the hollow that might save us, let us live.

No longer merely an instrument, but now the chance to be embodied selves, where feet can talk, backs can cry, and brains can listen. How can we put it? Not instruments, but co-respondents. Respondent to ourselves, respondent to other creatures, to trees and to water, earth and air. Not so much to dominate as to take in and give out. To breathe, to have spirit flowing through our lungs.

Maybe this is just the body talk of people over fifty-five, a wisdom that is only the knowledge of aging. Maybe the tulip poplar says too much in merely standing there. But it seems to me that we are swimming into different currents these days. We've reached the limits of our instrumental reason and its tyranny over bodies, nature, people. We're trying to put our life and world back together so it co-responds with the deepest impulses of creation. I feel it in my bones, my muscles, my tendons. I don't know where this journey's going, but I'm eager for company. Why don't we walk that way a while, even if our feet hurt, our backs are knotted up, and our head aches. The tulip poplar won't mind. It's a very patient tree. It's seen a lot of pain, a lot of cutting, a lot of splendid beauty. And it's still growing.

William Johnson Everett