July 17, 2003
Devilwood tree (again)
The continuing saga* of the devilwood tree:
Today, Jason, the tree guy, paid a pastoral call on the devilwood tree that’s planted in the cistern.
Of its four more or less nascent trunks, two must go, two must be appreciably pruned. For these latter, there is hope. For these former, none.
We’ve not exactly done right by it, he said, gently. Too many moves (two) in too little time in too many environments (three). Most anybody could have told us that (and probably will now). Even we could have told us that. But we were so hopeful and wanted so to help that we went to meddling.
It reminds me of Youth Work. We’re so hopeful and want to help and get so frustrated that we go to meddling. Of the myriad of curricula, programs, ghastly music, attempts to establish identity across chasms-of-chronos-reaching-for-kairos and never finding any, there seems no end. They leave and come back on their own or don’t come back on their own, and that’s that.
And then there’s also that classic oxymoron Affirmative Aging. How, indeed, we manipulate life as if it comes not in ages, but in packages, as if it were not all-inclusive, as if all were not worth affirming, as if aging did not start at zero on the Great Graph’s x & y axis and set out to permute all its cycles, as if nobody ever seems to know for whom the bell curves.
Pray God that just as there’ll be no Church in the Kingdom, there’ll neither be Youth Work nor Affirmative Aging, and that even the devilwood trees and their keepers will be indefectible.
*cf OoN 1vii03 & 7vii03