During the heart of the plague year, that is, those months of quarantine due to Covid, our family did pretty well there, for awhile. Dan and I both have flexible jobs, for which we are immensely grateful, so we were able to tuck in and out of parent-teacher-pastor-professor duties with graceful ninja-like skill. I was Zoom-meeting and drilling times tables, studying the letter to the Romans and explaining the difference between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. Dan was parsing Greek verbs and making another pot of Mac and cheese, and grading exegesis papers while explaining factor trees and how to find the volume of a graduated cylinder. And then, we just hit a wall. We’d reached capacity. We just couldn’t function any more. The boys were testing limits and our patience, bickering, leaving wet towels on the floor and dirty underwear in the bathroom. Dan and I worried about reading delays and social transitions and job security before crashing to sleep at night, only to do it all over again the next morning. We were doing our best to do our part to keep a deadly virus from becoming even more deadly, but that left us isolated, stuck inside, and perpetually fussy. I’m sure most of you can relate.
So one Saturday, after another fight over who was barging in to whose room, which then turned in to a fight over who hit whom first, which then turned in to an argument about who never gets in trouble and who always gets blamed for everything, I said, “That’s it we’re going to the woods.”
We have this joke in our family. We are always encouraging the boys to get outside. But, alas, we rarely make them. They almost always choose Netflix and Fortnite. But whenever the kids are having a rough day, and we go out for a walk together, usually over to our nearby Dormont park, and the kids have this transformation -- their moods just lift — they start laughing, they start running around, their imaginations light up, they get along, they tell funny stories and ask great questions -- and we take a moment to remind them of what’s just happened. “Isn’t it interesting,” we say, “now that you’re outside, breathing fresh air, running around, playing and being imaginative, you feel so much better.” Every time. We tell them that they’ll feel better if they go outside, they resist and protest, they give excuses and arguments, but when they finally do get out there, they’re shocked by how much better they feel. And every time, we remind them, with a tone of loving sarcasm I am convinced is appropriate for parents of a middle schooler, we say, “Huh. Funny how that works. You get outside and life just seems much better.”
But really, it’s actually science. The Japanese coined the term, “Shinrin-yoku” - translated “forest bathing.” And they’ve done tons of studies about the physiological benefits of just wandering in the forest, with no goal, no intention, no accomplishment in mind. Just wandering through the woods. Studies have shown that this “forest bathing” lowers cortisol and adrenaline, lowers blood pressure, reduces anxiety, depression, anger, confusion and fatigue. It improves focus, reduces ADHD symptoms, and craziest of all, they’ve found that plants give off this chemical called phytoncides. This chemical has antibacterial and anti fungal properties, and increases a type of white blood cell in our bodies that supports our immune system and is linked to a lower risk of certain cancers. In fact, patients in hospitals with “green views” have shorter post-operative stays, take fewer pain killers, and have fewer post-surgical complications compared to those who have no windows in their rooms. So if you need to just stare out of the window for the next ten minutes, go for it. It’s the best sermon around.
Sometimes, we’ve just got to get out to the woods.
So as we wander through the forest on Trinity Sunday, I first want to remind you how very good it is for us, just to wander. Because we might start wandering around today, and maybe start feeling a little lost. That’s certainly the case whenever I try to think about or somehow “comprehend” the Trinity.
I used to hate thinking about the Trinity. I’d end up in the philosophical and theological weeds where the theologians would drawl on and on with all the Greek and the pages of words and the footnotes. They’ll talk about the three in one and the one in three. They’ll use big words like perichoresis and hypostasis. One God in three persons, consubstantial in person, nature, essence and will. But also separate and distinct in and of themselves. Co-equal. Co-powerful. These authors insist on their rightness, and on their willingness to burn anyone else who might have a different perspective. There is one God in whom there are three persons who share one substance, and these persons, though one God, go by different names to denote those persons. They wax poetic about the heresies of modalism and Sabellianism and Arianism. And then we wet-behind-the-ears seminarians would act like we understood what the heck they were talking about and we’d write papers about our own perfect orthodoxy that would get graded according to how smart we sounded, when really all we were doing was stringing words we didn’t understand together into incomprehensible theses and feeling really proud of ourselves.
We’d use analogies like water and ice and steam, or the head, body and feet of a river, or a god “powerpack” that descends from the heavens, entirely God, but somehow suffused into a human body. We’d argue about the co-existence of the Son or the adoptionist theory that Jesus was made by God and then adopted in to God’s self. We’d argue about whether hypostasis means “essence” or “person.” And when we’d reach a dead end, when we’d start talking in circles and hiding our logical fallacies. After all the pages and the Greek and the footnotes and the Fathers we’d read, we’d shrug our shoulders, get to our required word count and say, “it’s a mystery.” “You must have faith.” The copout helicopter that will fly in to rescue us when we’re lost in the wilderness.
Somehow, being lost in the woods was just not ok. We like to have things figured out. We like to know and understand and comprehend and then tell others they’re wrong.
But it’s ok. We really don’t have to have it all figured out. We’re just forest bathing.
We don’t have to understand any aspect or element of the forest in order to receive its benefits. Take a deep breath; we’re fighting cancer.
But I do want to tell you something cool about the forest, something that I think shows us a little bit of what the Trinity is like. And if you get lost, it’s no big deal, just come back to the surface, and forest-bathe.
So often we think that we’ve got to get it all figured out, all by ourselves, we’ve got to come to this “personal” understanding of who Jesus is and what he has done for us, so that then we can go out and convince others to individually do the same. We look at nature like that, too. We don’t realize that everything is connected, that the elk need the wolves and the wolves need the prairies and the prairies need the elk in order for any of them to survive. We look at a tree and we think it’s this single thing, this one entity, this one “person,” “entire of itself.” But really, one tree is in unique relationships with all the other organisms all around it. In a sense, the tree is still a tree, but it is also the whole forest.
They call it the “wood-wide-web.” It’s a mycorrhizal network that creates a language through which the entire forest speaks to itself. So this network is made up of densely packed fungal threads that connect even plants of other species to each other. This fungus forms mycorrhiza with plant roots, and in this complicated system of tunnels and tubes, much in the same vein as our own internet, plants are able to pass chemicals between themselves in a sort of give-and-take relationship. It’s a “straight up exchange between plants and fungi. Plants provide carbon rich sugars made by photosynthesis, and in return, they get nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi scavenge from the soil.” And then “other plants use this fungal network to communicate to each other, and through these fungal networks, the plants themselves exchange sugars, nutrients, and water between themselves,” even if they aren’t members of the same species. Mother trees have been known to send extra carbon to their seedlings. When a birch needs more carbon and the fir has too much, the fir sends some over. Dying trees will donate their nutrients to specific neighbors. They’ll even send warnings to other neighboring plants. If one species is being attacked by a certain kind of aphid, they’ll tell all their neighbors to increase a certain chemical that will attract a specific wasp that just so happens to feed on aphids, even if their neighbors haven’t been infested with the aphids yet.
As we wander the forest. As we breathe deeply the phytoncides and focus our brains and fight off potential cancers. Just think about all that’s going on underneath our feet. Scientists still don’t have a full grasp on what’s happening. Although they can detect signals going from one plant to the next, although they can prove that there’s some kind of communication going on here that suggests unity among the diversity, although they know that each species is unique in and of itself and yet still a part of some great organism, there is still so much we don’t know about what’s going on in and through those mycorrhizal tunnels. We know now that forests aren’t just made up of single organisms in a survival of the fittest, fighting for resources battle, but they’re also this bigger, greater, more connected thing, united by this network of fungus that enables them to relate and speak and help each other. There’s a web beneath us, orchestrating and coordinating everything all around us.
And that’s the Trinity.
At least, that’s how my puny little brain is understanding and relating to this trinitarian idea, for now.
It’s this web of interconnectedness. The means through which we relate to one another. The tunnels through which information and needs and desires and gifts are exchanged. The system of relationships that unites us all.
It’s this mechanism of interconnectedness that reminds us that none of us are alone, none of us can survive without each other, and none of us is separate from this great web of being.
When we make connections with one another, when we offer someone a cup of water or a pair of shoes or the space in front of us in line, when we weep tears of mourning fifteen miles away from the most recent school massacre, when we cringe in frustration at our helplessness in a war happening an ocean away, when we are at our wit’s end with bickering families all stuck in the house during a global pandemic, we are participating in the movement of the Trinity. We are traveling through those mycorrhizal networks to reach out to one another, plant to tree to fern to fungus. We are participating in that web of interconnectedness that, at least for now, I like to think of as the Trinity - this great web of relationship. The great web of being.
And we don’t have to understand it, or “believe in it,” or learn complicated apologetics and theological backflips in order for us to participate in it, in order for us to feel the benefits of it. We can just bathe in it. Take a deep breath. Wander around. There is God beneath our feet.
Thanks be to God.
