The Sacred Grove

I thought once, a while ago, that the great thing about trees is that nothing yucky grows on them. At the time, I was in rebellion against green peppers, needless to say I was small, and I wished we only had to eat what grew on trees - fruit and nuts, which I liked. I stretched this category to include broccoli, which I also liked, and felt I could because broccoli looks exactly like miniature trees. I used to marvel at broccoli lying on my plate, looking like a big tree, and then strip it apart until I had a bunch of saplings before me, before I would eat it. So anyway, if we only had to eat tree food, no more peppers, no turnips, no bean sprouts, no spinach. It was a faulty system, but it worked for me then.

That was about the limit of my appreciation of trees, except that I also liked scaring myself to death climbing the evergreen that stood alongside our house until I was level with the roof. But other than that, it took many years before I had any deeper affection for them. Now I do, and thought they are not the only feature in nature that seems sacred to me, they are a powerful part of my experience of the creative spirit that infuses life and is part of what I call God. Less mighty than rock or mountain, closer than sky or sea, common as grass, dull as dirt, magic as stars, archaeology and our own souls tell us that trees are and have been an important part of religion for as long as there has been religion at all.

The history and diversity of trees in religion is such that it is too much to cover in one sermon. In fact this one sermon itself, has turned out to be more homogenous than I originally envisioned because there is simply too much to say about trees in any religion to do more that a few forms, if we are to be accurate. So this is the first of what will probably be a number of sermons on trees, with perhaps the druids and later western religion coming next.

What I want to start with this morning is some of the earliest forms of trees in religion - in the Minoan Greek religion that is really part of our prehistory, long before the classical Greece that we often think of as ancient. Classical Greece was around 500 to 400 BCE. The Minoans were arouind 3500 to 1100 BCE. Their culture and religion is still mysterious to us in many ways, but one of the few things we do know is that nature, both on land and in the sea, was very important to the Minoans.

One of the most important elements in their religion was trees. In fact, they had whole tree sanctuaries in Minoan religion. A distinctive image in their art: frescoes and even jewelry, was a large imposing tree, usually a fig or olive, usually enclosed by a wall, thus set apart as sacred. Various altars were also depicted, and a temple-like structure often stands opposite the tree which sometimes stood alone on open stony ground.

Sometimes female or male dancers move in ecstatic stances in front of the tree, or a goddess appears to worshippers. A miniature frescoe shows a large crowd of people beside a group of trees while in front of the trees a group of women raise their arms in excitement or in a dance.

The setting of such shrines seems to have been in the open countryside, and are difficult to identify archaeologically. But in a number of sites on Crete, votive gifts, including animals and figures, have been found alongside buildings, supporting the conjecture that an important part of religious life was enacted outdoors, far from the city and palace settlements. It seems likely processions would make their way to those palaces where the deity could appear in dance beneath the tree.

Later ancient Greek tree sanctuaries were written of, ie the reading from Sappho who wrote so alluringly of the sacred grove in her attempt to bring Aphrodite and her power over love to her shrine on Lesbos where Sappho spent most of her life and must have wanted help with an affair of the heart.

Story of Athena and the Olive Tree on the Acropolis

Highlights the significance of trees in ancient Greek religion in marking a sanctuary, epitomizing beauty and the continuity of life, with its shade and fruit. On Samos, at the Hera sanctuary the willow tree was incorporated into the great altar. On Delos, legend told that Leto leaned against the great palm tree there while giving birth to her divine twins Apollo and Artemis.

Just as Athena had her sacred tree, the olive, so did Apollo, the laurel, but generally trees were associated more with goddesses than gods. And this endured in Greece; an ancient Greek goddess associated with a grove of myrtle trees on Crete was eventually transmuted into Panagia Myrdiotissa - Virgin Mary of the Myrtle, and there is today a small shrine and a few nuns who serve her there, just as priestesses would have thousands of years ago.

It is interesting that trees could be sacred both singly and in groups, even to the same deity. A single olive gave Athena patronage over Athens, but she also had a small, exquisite sanctuary at Delphi, which was renowned as the site of Apollo's oracle and which the Greeks considered the center of the world. At Delphi, Athena was known as Athena Pronaos, Athena-before-the-temple, and pilgrims came to her sanctuary just before they reached Apollo's, while travelling on the sacred road which wound along the side of Parnassos, below the cliffs called the Phaedriades, the Shining Ones. In classical times, Athena's sanctuary had a temple, some treasury houses, a round columned building, and some altars.

But archaeologists have also found there small female figurines with holes in the top, meant to be hung with a string or leather thong from trees, and indeed even today the terrace on which her sanctuary sits contains also a silver grove of ancient olive trees. These figurines were hung as offerings, making the entire grove both a temple comprising sacred space, and an alter where gifts to the deity were given and received. The figurines would have hung on the branches and moved in the wind, which perhaps connects to the sense that motion was an important dynamic in early nature religion. The motion of offerings hung in trees was supported or perhaps echoed by the motion of the ecstatic dancers we see depicted in Minoan art.

(We don't think much about motion as religious in modern Western theology. But there is much evidence for it in ancient times - including ritual gestures depicted in Minoan art made by figures, both the divine and the worshippers, in religious encounters. But liturgical movement seems very natural, very mysterious and primal, and easier for me to imagine in outdoor settings than in formal church sanctuaries, which indeed are meant to accomodate large numbers of people, which inherently precludes much in the way of ritual dance.)

Much of the earliest sacral art found at her sanctuary has connections to earlier Minoan artifacts. In fact, there is much material that is tied to goddess cult which predates by centuries any artifacts at the Apollo sanctuary which became so famous and central in later times. Among other things, this indicates that at the time there was a sacred grove at Delphi, Apollo had not yet established his worship there, and the center of the world or navel of the earth as Greeks put it, was the place of a goddess, who eventually evolved into the classically known Athena Pronaos.

Thought I would, but not going to address Druidic nature cult in this sermon - there's too much to do responsibly already. Save it for another sermon, because it's important to address what all this ancient nature religion in and of trees has to do with any of us.

Dominant western religion doesn't hang anything in trees most places, or move in dance or invoke deities to their sacred groves. But we are most certainly moved, awed and inspired in and by nature, as much as ever. Think of the words to the Lake Isle of Innisfree:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin b uild there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live anlone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils ofmorning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always, night and day,
I hear lake-water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Or even as I wrote this sermon, my work reminded me of the poem of James Schuyler: October:

Books litter the bed,
leaves the lawn. It
lightly rains. Fall has
come: unpatterned, in the shedding leaves.

The maples ripen. Apples come home crisp in bags.
This pear tastes good.
It rains lightly on the random leaf patterns.

The nimbus is spread above our island.
Rain lightly patters on unshed leaves.
The books of fall litter the bed.

How would we in suburbs and cities, without corn fields or even orchards, understand autumn without trees. What would autumn be without the leaves that suddenly color our world, and litter our lawns and streets, without the crisp tang of their fallen selves melding with the earth as they begin to become the earth?

And which of us has not felt the enchantment of a sudden stand of white birches in a wood, slender and lovely, like fairies. Or seen some tremendous, ancient tree standing like a cathedral, exuding the power and presence of centuries, godlike. We know too what Samual Menashe meant when he wrote: My mother once said to me, "When one sees the tree in leaf one thinks the beauty of a tree is in its leaves, and then one sees the bare tree." And any of us that have been deep in a forest at night knows also that it can be a frightening place, full of sounds and movement, with the trees above us aloof and intimidating in their size. I moved here from the Hudson River Valley where the trees grow to great heights, and parts of the forest are still dark and majestic. Having been there, it has always made great sense to me that Washington Irving chose that setting for his headless horseman in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I've ridden through those woods on horseback on a dark night - and I was glad I had company.

The point of the transcendentalist movement in America, one of our denomination's greatest contributions to our nation and beyond, was that the inspiration and exaltation available in nature, in such wonders as a grove of trees that moves us to wonder and joy, or even fear, is as valid as any scripture or theological system. This is part of what Ralph Waldo Emerson was talking about when he wrote in his famous essay Nature: "Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?"

And indeed, it only deepens the joy and inspiration and power we can find in nature, in the mystery and silver light that pervades a grove of olive trees, to think that what we may find and feel there, is akin to what others felt, and celebrated more fully and creatively, two or three or four thousand years ago. The sacred grove, like the mountain, the sea or the desert, is a scripture we do not need language to understand. It is a message that transcends language, and calls us to transcend the bounds of the mundane world we so often see to the exclusion of all else. Nature is not bound or hindered by the interpretation or prophecy of one prophet or even one religion, if we cannot perceive it by one sense, it comes to us through another. We see the glory of autumn leaves and the cyclical endurance of the trees, we smell the leaves and the earth on the autumn breeze, we feel its briskness on our skin, we hear the rustle of leaves on the wind, and then later, only the wind, we taste the pear, the apple, the chestnut that come as minor miracles themselves.

We may salute the gods and goddesses of woodlands and trees, we may await their advent in groves, we may walk in forests and feel a presence, an order, ore simply the beauty and be nourished thus. But what we may not, or at least ought not, to do, is live in denial of the wonder and magic that people have found in one or many trees, by what surrounds us, because it does nourish us, spiritually as well as physically, and always has. To be aware, to be taken out of ourselves by something so silent, so patient, so persistent, so grace-filled as a tree, is good for us. And mindfulness of that truth can teach us that such truths are not acquired tastes, they are not the spinach or peppers on life's plate, they are dessert.