2018.12.30 Jesus Christ The Apple Tree?

Most Christians are familiar with the Garden of Eden myth in the Bible. Likewise, most Christians cast aspersions on the snake, or Eve, or the fatal forbidden apple itself. You’d think Eve was Snow White plucking and eating a fatal apple out of which popped the head of an asp. 
Incidentally, the Bible calls the fruit of the tree a “fruit” not an apple. Still, the apple won the day as the fruit of choice for delight and trouble, and snakes still scare the bejeezus out of many women. Ah the stereotypes we create!

Christians simply do not associate the apple with Jesus Christ    .   .  .  or do we?

This apple core stands today outside the Jewish Museum in Jerusalem. I loved posing with it.

Dick and I listen to the Festival of Lessons and Carols every Christmas Eve morning. It’s broadcast live on radio from Cambridge England. This year was its 100th anniversary. It is, oh, so traditional, and oh, so beautiful. This year for the first time I noticed something amazing about that old apple. One of the 15th century carols sings of Adam “ybounden”—tied in knots you might say, and all for the sake of an apple he took. The carol goes on to say, however, that had the apple not been taken, our lady would never have been a heavenly queen. And so we sing:

Blessed be the time
that apple taken was,
Therefore we moun singen  (may sing)
Deo Gratias

Interpretations abound of course, but this medieval one caught me up as I realized how valuable the old apple turned out to be for Christians. I now see the supposed curse of Eden in a new light, call it Eve and Adam claiming their place in the salvation scheme, taking the first bite into the Incarnation, that spiritual action by which things divine are joined with things human—and all thanks to an “apple” from the Christ-tree.

There’s even a medieval English carol singing praises to both apple and tree.

Jesus Christ The Apple Tree
  tune by Elizabeth Poston

1. The tree of life my soul hath seen,

Laden with fruit and always green:

The trees of nature fruitless be

 Compared with Christ the apple tree.

2. His beauty doth all things excel:

By faith I know, but ne'er can tell

The glory which I now can see

In Jesus Christ the apple tree.

3. For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought:

I missed of all; but now I see

'Tis found in Christ the apple tree.

4. I'm weary with my former toil,

Here I will sit and rest awhile:

Under the shadow I will be,

Of Jesus Christ the apple tree.

5. This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,

It keeps my dying faith alive;

Which makes my soul in haste to be

With Jesus Christ the apple tree.

                                                                     Deo Gratias.  

 

 

The apple ne'er does fall far from the tree. 

2013.12.24 Nativity Eve

The image of Snowy seemed a fitting image for Nativity Eve.  At least it’s better than a stork or even the traditional dove!   I might have used the traditional creche image of Jesus surrounded by love and dung in a manger, but Snowy represents divine labor—the movement just before birth, into life. 

How would you image such a mystery as the very soul of Divinity arriving from the god-knows-where place we call “heaven” to roost in human flesh? 

The great swooping snowy owl has power, an enormous wing spread, golden eyes centered and focused with so much intensity it’s frightening—and what looks like a goofy smily face. Really!

I imagine that this was the kind of look I had on my face in the moment of birthing my first daughter, the moment when everything changed. After long hours of ongoing painful contractions going nowhere I felt quite desperate and powerless. Then it happened, the phase I call the big push. My uterus came alive, woke up from its droning labor and began to help me. Together we pushed.

It didn’t take long. With a little assistance from cheerleading nurses and a doctor pulling with what looked like tongs (poor little child) my daughter came into her own life. All pain swept away and I grinned at the wondrous gift of a girl, also at the natural power in my body, power I’d never known was there, Snowy power.

God the Creator must have felt like this, I thought—such a mighty effort, such a stupendous effort to potentiate a whole cosmos of teeming life, such tender exertion to break into each tiny infant body. There is not a single living thing that goes unaffected by Her labor into birth.