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Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Meaning and Message of Forests and Trees in the Christian Tradition (Part IV)

Restoring this Christian unitive vision of creation as a cosmic sacrament points us to the Iconic Tree. The Iconic Tree  The mystery of life is that even the life of fallen nature partakes somehow of the Life beyond life, even though without redemption access to the Tree of Life remains blocked by separation, sin and death. As a great saint of the early Church, Dionysios the Areopagite wrote in his enormously influential work, The Divine

Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Meaning and Message of Forests and Trees in the Christian Tradition (Part II)

Characteristically, Scripture uses the image of trees and forests in three basic ways, plus a subsuming fourth, which represent respectively three kinds of the Scriptural tree, corresponding roughly to the Pauline trichotomy of body, soul and spirit, plus a transcending fourth, representing the presence of the Holy Spirit that is “everywhere present and fillest all things.” We may call these three types of tree usages the Natural Tree, the Metaphoric Tree and the Symbolic Tree.