So Speaks the Redbud

Sometimes I struggle with the words.

When I climbed up the embankment at the crash site yesterday where Midwest Boulevard passes under Turner Turnpike, what passed between me and that redbud tree with magenta buds peeking out on its branches was more than just some diffuse emotion. The physical contact was comforting and reduced my own internal jangling confusion just a little. I had ridden up there in response to some wordless moral imperative in the first place.

You could call it a sense of conviction, but that moment shared with an unfallen member of God’s Creation passed something to me that didn’t register on my conscious mind right away. The conscious mind is too immediate to process eternal moral stuff. I could tell you that God spoke to me from the middle of a bush that doesn’t yet appear aflame as it will later, but you might get the wrong impression from such an image. If I remind you that all Creation sings of God’s moral character, it might make more sense. But the tree itself had experienced things individually in its odd location there.

And perhaps the concrete abutment or the grass and dirt itself could have told me things, too, but I didn’t hear what they had to say. God chooses His own voice in His own time, and moral conviction cannot be expressed in terms of factual content. But there would be no point if there wasn’t some useful application. Let’s just say that using your heart as a sensory organ and allowing it to process those moral impressions independently will improve your understanding of God. And that’s the whole point, because Ultimate Truth is a Person, not a collection of mere data. I touched a living thing and it touched me in return, preparing me to discern things to which I might otherwise be blind.

So I can’t pass to you a precise outline of how it works, but I can share with you some of the results.

The rate of human mortality sits as a background fact in our awareness. The moral meaning of it is a little harder to assess in those terms. The redbud didn’t tell me what kind of man it was who crashed his vehicle into the concrete, nor what kind of stresses led up to that event. Instead, it told me of the moral distress his death represents as a change, part of a larger shift in the moral climate that includes a level of human torment not previously seen by anyone alive now. His death was not just the same old stuff we’ve seen in the past. His death is distinctly part of something bigger: More people will die in more unpleasant ways than we are used to hearing about. The hearing about it is the part that should worry us a little. Getting an accurate report is a sorrow that looms as ugly as does the facts of human torment.

I don’t pretend to know anything about the state of mind of the photographers and that KOCO info-babe wandering around out there in reflective safety vests. I do know that the images they gathered, if used at all, will be used to mislead people about the real moral importance of things. I know that because such is the very reason those broadcast companies exist. Nor do I imagine that my own private reverie was the one final truth of things there. I am altogether conscious about God using me, but I have to wonder how conscious those other folks were about dealing with our Creator. I wonder because I know beyond all doubt that this entire society is built on a substrate of lies and whatever folks have been doing to make things different is still built on that same false foundation. It won’t matter if folks pushing changes imagine those changes represent good or bad.

What the redbud had to say presumed that understanding.

What we have is the fruit of deception on a level so vast that it boggles the mind. You can see the tiny budding red blossoms, along with the greening of the grass as the fresh verdant sprigs come up in the midst of the dry golden strands. Can you see the destruction growing slowly around us? It was all put into place precisely so that it could be destroyed painfully. Our Enemy means to devour us. Humans souls were ground into hamburger from the beginning, and more will be masticated and burned beyond recognition very soon as it all comes to some kind of fraying edge that hides the end.

This is what’s on my mind as I process what passed between the redbud and me, and it’s what stands behind today’s post on the other blog.