June 9, Feast of St. Columba, Colum-cille
There were once two huge elm trees; they lived on the farm I was born on in Ohio. Pretty near the road, but when they were planted back in the Dreamtime, that road was a dirt track. Or perhaps a mere trail between the then endless forest that luxuriated between Lake Erie in the north and the Ohio River in the south. A cabin stood there, at some point, a log cabin cornered on four large boulders that only had their tops showing. Two of them you could run the mower over, the other two were high enough you had to mow around them. But by the time I was born, and the elms were gone.
The Dutch Elm Disease killed them.
But when my parents and older brothers moved to this location, the elms stood. And what elms there were. 80 feet high, or 24 meters, and 100 feet or so across, 30.5 meters. They shaded everything in the yard as well as the house (the house that had replaced the cabin ages ago). But they died, killed by one of the three species of ascomycete microfungi. Their stumps remained for years, though, and I remember those well enough.
(One of the reasons I don’t want to go to Hell is there, in Hell, I’d never see those trees, whereas in Heaven I’m sure they’re still growing, and in the deep shade of God’s Beatific Vision.)
All that reminds me of the lost Latin Mass of my youth, something I don’t remember either, not consciously. I grew up haunted by those elms and that lost Mass. As I walked about, breathing, living, taking up space and spinning out time, I knew, just knew – as when you know you’ve left your keys behind but can’t remember what you’re missing – I just knew there was something gone astray. Something misplaced, something lost and longed for.
I suppose it’s my fate to be haunted. The Irish language was the other thing missing from my life, but more on that in another essay, for it is the biggest ghost of all, as we can speak together, it and I.
At any rate, I’m familiar with ghosts.
But imagine walking up to an elm tree like one of those and staring up at its arcing branches, for an ulmus americana often develops in the shape of water shot out of a hose directly upward, beautiful branches in arcs angling out from a straight stem. And the leaves: I’ve looked at, rubbed, collected ulmus leaves since childhood and they’re ‟hairy” on top, but an ulmus americana’s leaves were hard on top, smooth, almost like plastic. Imagine their voices – I’ve heard this noise all my life, in the sounds of sugar maple leaves sighing in the breeze – the susurration of thousands a leaves rustling on the wind, emerald banderoles of the Living God. Imagine starting up at such a glorious, living thing, and then whipping out a chain saw, firing it up, its ratcheting guttural grind pitching high into a speed-of-light roar, and then attacking that tree.
Picture yourself attacking it, sawing away, ‟getting into it” with aplomb and adrenaline, glorying in the cracking and crashing sounds of the great limbs falling to earth. And eventually, you’ve most of it cut down – not all of it, but what is left is mostly cut away: there you stand, in sweat, sawdust, and numbed arms and hands, and there you gesture to the poor horror and say in a triumphant voice: NOW I’ve gotten down to the TRUE tree! I’ve cleaned away the clutter and this is the heart’s core of an elm!”
You’d be mad. Madder than any hatter. Were any druids still around, they stab you to death with stone knives and foretell the future from the way your blood leaped forth in freedom from your hide.
That’s what Luther did. (The tree-cutting, not the druid part – he had the wrong ancestry for that.) It’s what Calvin did. The formidable Huldrych Zwingli did, too (I say ‟formidable” because Luther, on hearing that Zwingli was killed in battle, said, ‟Good! I’m glad he’s dead!” because Luther met him and got the sense that here was a potential Protestant Alexander, a Swiss Caesar, and such ambitious, capable men are clearly feared by ambitious but less than capable men).
All the original Protestant reformers were like Muhammad himself in wanting to ‟get back to basics”, pare it all down the the root of the issue, go back to the pure and unsullied faith held by the Patriarchs at the beginning. And Muhammad is a good metaphor. Though the Arabic Muslim ‟Muhammad” probably didn’t exist at all, or if he did, not as anything (much) like his legend (the very name ‟Muhammad” is a title, not a name per se, and means ‟the praised one” and had been originally applied by Arab speakers to Christ. But Muhammad the Legend is a great metaphor because he cleared out the idols from Mecca but left the most important, dangerous idol of all, the black meteorite, so the Reformers threw down and smashed the statues and overturned and broke the altars and shattered the heavenly stained glass windows, but left the black stone of Unbelief that lies all too close to the heart of every honest believer, and to those especially on very steps of the altar (that last is from C. S. Lewis).
So the Protestants cut down the 2,000-year-old elm tree of the Church, or tried to. And asked why, they said, ‟We’re just doing a little trimming! Getting rid of the bark! The leaves! The outer wood! Because we want to inner, true root to flower!”
I don’t want to ‟pick on” Protestants, or at least, not on the honest Christian believers I grew up with and among whom I still have a friend or two, but rather the ‟true, inner Protestant” is my quarry, the iconoclast, the merciless Reivers. We have them in Catholicism too. Hordes. ‟Back in the day,” in Luther’s day, the various states, kingdoms, republics, free cities, and the Holy Roman Empire, all had a say in ‟church-state” relations, and these either embraced the Protestant Revolution or banished it, so therefore Luther & Co. all had to ‟get out” of the Church.
In the time of Vatican II, the various states could not possibly care less what the Church did, or didn’t do, and so the ‟Protestants”, the iconoclasts just stayed on, ‟reivering” away even still, the infamous "Wreckovators" who destroy old churches, to a day when Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx and that roman-collared sex-fiend fornicator Karl Rahner realized they would all have to do a naked fertility dance in St. Peter’s Square, AND do such a dance on naked ladies invocating Dionysus himself, to get excommunicated. (Even Küng, of whom it could be said Luther was more Catholic, was never excommunicated, just ‟reprimanded”, whatever that consists of in such a context.)
Druidism must run in my blood. Or at least I’m somehow kin to the Ents. For I loath Tree Reivers wherever they ply their uncivilized, mordant trade.
An Préachán
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