The Oaks in Winter: An Excerpt

The sharpest trials are the finest furbishing,

The most tempestuous weather is the best seedtime.

A Christian is an oak flourishing in winter.

The words of the 17th-century religious poet Thomas Traherne have stayed with me ever since I first read them twenty-five years ago. I have never forgotten them because they express in a few potent phrases a fundamental element of our Faith: we are a people who stand as a sign of hope, and a sign of contradiction, in the midst of this confused world.

I know a little about the climate of England, where the poet wrote these lines, but I assume the British oak must be famous for standing sturdy against the North Atlantic rain; must shake its arms in defiance against the occasional fall of swift-melting snow. The poet’s metaphor is a powerful one, and I have always loved it, though it lacks a certain accuracy for those of us who live in sub-Arctic regions. We too have oaks, the kings of the eastern woodlands, but they do not exactly flourish in our sort of winter.

A few weeks ago I went hiking with our children on a high hill that overlooks the valley in Ontario where we live. We approached the summit of a rocky cliff that faces the village. Above us on the crest there was a stand of oaks thrashing their burgundy leaves against a cloudy sky. They were among the last trees to retain their foliage, for the winds had combed the surrounding forests, tearing away the blanket of stunning color which covers it for a few weeks each year.

In late autumn everything is stripped down to its essential form. On this particular day the rolling muscles of the earth were uncovered, the arteries of creek and river were laid bare; the light in the sky was alternately cruel and exhilarating, slate-grey with occasional gashes of cerulean blue.

A hawk flew over, soaring on updrafts. A few last yellow birch leaves twirled by on a crosswind. It was stark and beautiful—so beautiful in fact that the children abandoned their customary galloping and noisemaking, and were content to sit and to see, to gaze with deep draughts of long looking.

We sat on the edge of the cliff for a long time, and after awhile we prayed together for the people of the valley, for the many good enterprises bustling there, for our own needs, for the Church, and for families throughout the world. As we prayed, a gust of wind burst through the winds behind us. It was strangely warm, despite the cold day, and it carried the intoxicating smells of the ending year. Within that pungent aroma was the smell of acorns, containing messages about death and rebirth. Along with it came the underlying sense that written into creation are “words” from our Creator, for God has designed all living things, even the simplest, to bear a kind of witness to larger truths. An acorn, a maple key, pips in a pine cone, even the lowly mustard seed—tiny, deceptively simple—contain a vast library of meaning. A seed is so much more than just a code for replicating itself, more than an investment in a distant Spring. More than just a statement of faith on the part of a tree, a biological equivalent to the virtue of hope. A seed is a kingdom, a world really. It has the future wrapped tightly in every cell, waiting to unfold; entire forests lie buried in each small kernel.

God is lavish. Many seeds are dropped onto the soil. Many do not sprout. Yet beneath the  appearance of waste nothing is wasted, nothing lost. Giant trees crash to the forest floor, decompose and become the soil out of which the saplings arise. Similarly, in human affairs, movements are created, rise, do a work of God in the world, decline, go back into the soil, and provide the rich humus out of which new life springs. Generations come and go. Sun and rain, winter and summer, seed time and harvest. Always the Word of God remains constant. His people are called over and over, generation after generation, back into this constancy, back to this mysterious fluid stability—the only real security worth having.

It is important to remember this, especially now, for we are entering a period of extreme instability in the human order. The might of the earth are moving towards absolute power in an effort to establish control over what they perceive to be the chaos of the human condition. It is a harsh period, for winter seizes the hearts of many. Love grows cold. Honesty declines. Crime reaches epic proportions. Marriage is picked to pieces by analysts; the relations between men and women have become horribly complicated, fraught with tension, riddled with ideology. The family farm has given way to the factory farm. The village to the metropolis. The craftsman to the mega-machine. The shop to the corporation. Men hurl their malice upon each other in high-tech wars, though the machete is still in use here and there. Millions of children die unseen within the death-chambers of our clinics and hospitals, accomplishing, for sheer numbers, what Auschwitz, Bosnia, and Rwanda could not begin to do. Belief in human life falters, hearts are pumped full of dread. Theorists discuss ways in which the death of billions of human beings can be accomplished effectively, humanely—billions of miracles, billions of mysteries eliminated. And thus, more and more people are drawn into despair on one hand or sensualism on the other, searching for the merest hint of the great fire of Love—He who longs for them to turn to Him, if they would only believe.

Pope John Paul II often pleaded with the peoples of the West, most urgently in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, to turn away from their massive consumption, their omni-economies, their addiction to comfort heaped upon comfort; all those things that secretly contribute to the piling of victim upon victim in the dark places of our society, and which openly push us all toward another end of things. He asked us to build more human -size economies, more responsible ways of living, to create a civilization of love in the midst of what he called a “culture of death.” He asked the impossible of us, because it is precisely the impossible to which we are called.

The Holy Father spoke often of the coming of the third millennium, and he did not want us to wait passively for it. He saw it as a time for a new evangelization, as seed time, as a time of flourishing. But he knew also that there will be a death involved, a death to our selfishness. Advent, placed so strategically at the dying of the year, is good training for this. We must not be like the ancient pagans who watched the coming of winter with a kind of terror-stricken obsession, mesmerized by the specter of death, enslaved to death, sacrificing their children to the insatiable appetite of death. During Advent, we learn to gaze into the growing dark with Spring in our eyes. Impossible? Yes, it is. But Christians must always keep an icon of the impossible in their hearts as a model of the true shape of reality, so much bigger than our terrors.

This is the time to recall that Mary’s womb contained the impossible, the unthinkable. In that sacred little room of hers was nurtured the seed that would save the world from darkness. Encoded there, as if on a double helix, were the martyrs and mystics, the cathedrals and the statues, the Christian East and West, the songs of the monks, the encyclicals, the poems, the millions of children who might not otherwise have been. Is it any wonder that we are fond of her? Is it any wonder that at Christmas we think of her so much? Is it so odd that we should call her Mother?

Joseph too—small, hidden man from the least of villages—he contained the heart of the true father, and made it possible for a new world to come into being. Joseph, foster father to a fatherless world, living icon of the Father, remained open to messages and thus helped make it possible for God to come as man. His obedience protected the very existence of the child. His vigilance, his justice, his love, made it possible for the child to grow as man. What a marvel this is, and what a scandal. Why all this weakness? Why the poverty, the smallness, the hiddenness? It does not make sense: God born in a cold time. Heaven come down to earth in a season of peril. The savior of Israel revealed as powerlessness during the final ruin of the nation of Israel. For those people, our elders in the faith, it was the End. Therein lies the puzzle, the paradox, and the scandal: He came at the worst possible moment, let us say even the impossible moment, and the world, which was powerful and sick unto death, burning and dying in its sins, was born again.

It is hard to get your mind around it. It has to be heard again and again: God’s strength is to be found in weakness. Nazareth of Galilee was the place where that small, clear, indestructible message was first lived. It is lived again and again in each generation, often in the face of overwhelming odds. Civilizations rise and fall. Saints and tyrants, kings and poor men are born, grow old, and die. Cultures, theories, opinions, fashions, theologies, movements, rise up and disappear again. That is why our faith can never be merely a system of religious thought, a set of ethics or a beautiful culture, as necessary as those are. When everything is stripped down to its essential form, our faith is a belief in Jesus, true God and true Man, the only Christ, dwelling in the heart of His Church, He who was, who is, and who is to come. That is why our home is the universal Church, the throne on which He reigns, a Church that is within time and yet outside of time. That is why we can say that the Church is a billion people gathered to worship the Eucharistic Presence in glorious Saint Peter’s, and, at the same time, a battered priest dressed in rags saying a clandestine Mass in a concentration camp.

The Church passes through eras in which she glories in the summer’s triumph, and other periods when she goes down into the cold earth, apparently beaten. It may well be that her highest glory is to be found precisely there, hidden beneath a carpet of leaves, to all appearances dead, but very much alive, waiting for Spring.

*From the opening pages to “The Oaks in Winter” by Michael O’Brien in The Family and the New Totalitarianism (2019) with introduction by Jessica Hooten Wilson. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.