I stood and stared in awe.

I was just a little boy when my father took me to the cathedral that very first time and I stood there and looked up in great wonderment.

Over my head massive timbers reached out from the apex in all directions. The central pillar, a grand and ancient monolithic support to the whole and the whole made no less impressive by the fact that truly this was a temple, “made without hands” for the cathedral was no man made edifice but a living thing.

What I was looking at, what held my attention, my fascination was in fact an oak tree.

But what an oak it was.

At the very base, where the giant’s feet were anchored to the earth it was fully ten feet thick. Its trunk soared unbroken by branch or twig for a good twenty feet into the air and there the branches began, gracefully reaching out, extending their fingers of branchettes in welcome to whatever birds may choose to build their nests therein.

Higher still the oak tree grew and lifting his head he exalted over his domain, spreading his arms in welcome to all.

Many years before my first visit, after having stood for how many hundreds of years, the magnificent oak was struck by lightening.

That fiery bolt of pure energy exploded the upper portion of the giant and that ruined portion plummeted to the forest floor.

What remained was a jagged snag, a remnant still rising above most of its neighbors and made perhaps even more impressive by the fact that the ancient one had not only survived that deadly stroke from Thor’s hammer but thrived in the surviving.

The wind, the forest wind continued to sing its song among the oak’s branches.

A pair of bald eagles built their nest in the forest giant’s hair and they were lulled to sleep each night for years of nights by the whispered song of the wind in the tree’s uppermost branches.

The passenger pigeons came each year and roosted by the thousands, at times completely enshrouding the tree in a feathery mantle, and then each sunrise that mantle would be lifted as the birds went out to forage.

Over the years the tree suffered a malignancy which ate away at the very core of its being. The resulting cavity served as home for a pair of raccoons and there the female gave birth to her first litter.

That first pair of eagles lived, grew old and died and another pair adopted the nest as their own.
The passenger pigeons came in numbers beyond numbering and generations of raccoon pups began their lives deep in the heart of the ancient monolith.

A red man, sensing that his time was near chose a spot beneath the oak to end his days. There, sitting with his back against the skin of the oak he sang his death song, he went to sleep, and there his bones moldered, chewed upon by rodents and scattered by the fox and the coyote until those whitened bones sank into the forest floor to contribute their minerals to the rich soil.

Other men came.

They did not contribute.

They came with guns and they slaughtered the innumerable passenger pigeons, those same birds that were beyond numbering were no more.

Men saw the eagles nest and with selfish design they drove spikes into the skin of the old oak and then, step by step they ascended where no man had been before.

Those men took the eagles fertile eggs and drained them and the useless, dead eggs were added to collections of other useless, dead eggs.

The eagles abandoned the desecrated nest.

The pigeons were no more.

The eagles nest was adopted by a pair of great horned owls.

More years passed.

I came on the first of my many pilgrimages.

I saw the remains of those spikes the first raiders had placed there, more a row of scar like weal’s with only a few showing age rusted metal, the rest completely covered by the persistent growth of the old oak.

Then lightening struck once one more final, devastating blow and the tree was split asunder. That massive first branch, amputated, dropped to the forest floor with a roar that was heard only by the spirits that roam in that place.

The raccoon’s den exposed; the tree ruined, “oh how the mighty have fallen.”

Over the ensuing years a smattering of presumptuous upstarts have attempted to extend their shadows a bit more hoping they could stand in the patriarch’s place but they were dismayed to find that they could not assume a stature even large enough to keep them safe from the first browsing deer that happened by.

I went back and there I was pleased and mightily encouraged, for out of the very center of the mound that is all that remains of the old oak tree is a perfect young oak tree approximately twenty feet tall. It is strong in trunk, perfect in symmetry, truly a prince among oaks.

Isaiah 61: 3. “For they will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor.”

You Should Also Check Out This Post:

More Active Posts: