An Advent Pater Noster
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Earlier this year, in the north-east of England, two men were given prison sentences for cutting down a tree.
On the 28th September 2023, Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers destroyed a sycamore tree which stood in splendid isolation by a dip in Hadrian’s Wall.
The place was known as Sycamore Gap.
As the whine of their chainsaw pierced the night, one of the men used his smart-phone to film the great tree crashing to the ground. Then he took a piece of the trunk home as a souvenir.
When the vandalism was discovered, public reaction was seismic. The tree had been a hallowed place. A place where weary hikers rested, children played and lovers proposed. It had even featured in the film Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.
Some had scattered the ashes of their loved ones in the roots of the tree.
Now only the roots were left.
The National Trust, which owns the land where the tree stood, set up a space in a nearby visitors’ center and invited people to share their thoughts.
One person left a post-it note reading: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
It is now December, the darkest point of the year. Above the town where I live Dartmoor stretches out, looming rock formations punctuating the bogland where small, hardy ponies graze.
Impossible to walk there right now, even during reduced daylight hours, for Storm Bram is raging. No doubt the gale-force winds will rip trees from the soft green hills between moor and sea. I gaze at the huge oak just beyond my garden wall, hoping that it will not be a casualty.
A few years ago a similar storm brought down a beech on the nearby estate of Dartington. I felt sad to see the stump of that tree and, being close to Passiontide, I noted that its jagged outline looked like a gibbet. But I did not mourn its passing as the tree at Sycamore Gap has been mourned.
“Acts of God” are one thing: extreme weather, for one. Acts of man are another thing altogether. Didn’t they have anything better to do than destroy this thing of beauty? What were they thinking?
But the motivations of the Sycamore Gap vandals have never been made clear. A joke, a jape, a prank . . . none of the proposed judgments really land. They lacerated the famous beauty spot because they could: they had the technology.
Give us this day our daily bread
I am approaching the part of my life when the past and the future collide in a keening east wind. How did I lose so much time? How much time is left to me? As the dark hours of the darkest days unfold, I struggle to hold my mind in a place of light. I struggle to pray.
I can see that there is color in the world, still. But a cataract is slowly spreading across my right eye, a slow dimming to match the tinnitus.
Wars and rumors of war. All I hear is the impersonal whine of weaponized humanity.
The faces of my grandchildren, my daughters, the pleasure of spinning words. Through these I know the “unfelt joy” that Saint Therese of Lisieux spoke about with her sister Celine, at a time when their father was losing his mind and his daughters were being judged by the bien-pensants of Lisieux for abandoning him in favor of the convent. Another form of weaponized humanity: the idle tongue.
What to do with this darkness? I tell God that I believe in his promises, only . . . I cannot feel the belief. I visualize a dimple-jar like the one my mother used to save silver sixpences in. Kerching, kerching. I pop in my widow’s mite and mention this intention and that. Leave it to himself, so. Blowed if I can figure it out.
I wait for bread, unleavened, substantial on the tongue. I pray others will receive it too.
And forgive us our trespasses . . .
In the Newcastle-upon-Tyne courtroom, Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers stared straight ahead as they were sentenced. During the entire prosecution and trial they behaved as though they had nothing to do with each other. Which was strange, since Carruthers had once been described as Graham’s only friend. He had done the older man a great favor by restoring the chassis of his father’s Range Rover at a terrible time in Graham’s life. The time after his beloved father took his own life.
The sharpest point, surely, if we are fumbling our way towards a motive.
A crucial fact among many random ones, shedding light on Graham’s state of mind when he drove, in that same Range Rover, to attack the sycamore.
Grief has always wrought chaos in the soul.
. . . as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Under the post-it note about the perps not knowing what they were doing when they cut down the tree, there was another note. “Yes they do. Some people are just wired-up wrong.”
As I was trying to write this piece, men with jack-hammers started to dig up the road outside my house. It is the third or fourth time in a few years that the same bit of tarmac has been ripped out, each time for a different utility company. There is no co-ordination between these corporations, so my neighbors and I have to endure the disruption over and over again. Blame the local council, for giving them endless permission to disrupt our lives in the name of the capitalist dream.
Daniel Graham lived in a caravan, from which the council had just evicted him, as it was not supposed to be used as a residence. He survived on odd jobs and said in court that he could barely distinguish one day from the next. His neighbors did not like him, as he appeared aggressive and difficult to deal with. So he could not get permission to build anything more substantial on his small piece of land.
Yep: wired-up wrong.
And lead us not into temptation . . .
The only weapon I possess is a blunt kantha belonging to my eldest daughter. My petty frustrations will have no repercussions other than some choice language to be washed in the carbolic of the confessional.
Let’s be clear. I am not being bombed out by drone-strikes. I have a roof over my head and some breath in my lungs.
Kerching, kerching.
For the mutilated babies. For the mourning mothers. For the stressed-out fathers. For the disenfranchised, desperate, dysfunctional sons.
For terrorists in the making. For their victims.
. . . but deliver us from evil.
The cavalry is coming, right? St Michael’s kantha is sharp, his aim true.
And then there is that Baby. The one whose parents had to undertake an arduous journey at just the wrong time. Who could find nowhere to rest their heads, let alone for his mother to give birth. (How come no one offered to give up his room for her, in her extremity?)
And those mothers in Bethlehem, wailing over the bodies they labored to give life to. Yes. Labored.
Pope Leo, on his way back from the Lebanon, suggested the journalists read Brother Lawrence. What would the world be like, if everyone actually practiced the Presence of God? Presence, not presents.
The wilderness and dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus; it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon (Is 35:1-2).
What if Jesus had come to a run-down caravan in the north-east of England, just as he came to that stable in the Middle East? Someone would have had to carry him there, of course. To knock on the door of a dour, depressed middle-aged man, to run the risk of rejection.
Behind every crime lie multiple lines of causality.
Beneath every tree there are always roots, a hidden life illuminated in ways we cannot understand. Trees are the lungs of the earth, after all.
If we turn the sad absence of the Sycamore Gap upside down, we see another picture. A hill on which the tree of life blooms against the everlasting stars.
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit (Is 11:1).
