Last week my sister sent me a message asking me if I remembered when it was that we sat under the shade of a large Eucalyptus tree, in the patio of a local pub, in a small village in Wales. The village was where we spent four years of our childhood; the pub was run by our parents, who were the landlords at the time; and the tree was planted (as a sapling) by my mother, who dreamed of having a touchstone of the time when we lived in Cyprus as she imagined sitting under it on hotter days.
She may have been told that planting it was a waste of effort, that she would never see it reach its full potential or, if she did, that she would never have time to enjoy the cool of its shade…I still remember how hard she worked, and how relentless the pub’s hours were. But it was her dream, it was something that kept her connected to a happier time from the past, and also demonstrated her faith in an imagined future. A faith that she felt and could imagine strongly enough to want to manifest it, in a physical and lasting way.
The answer to my sister’s question was “2014 or 2015”, more than 40 years after the sapling was planted, and we were the ones both enjoying the shade of its sprawling branches and appreciating the strength of my mother’s faith and determination. She was a force of Nature, not unlike the rapidly-growing and ubiquitous Eucalyptus tree. “It’s an act of selflessness, to plant something you will never see in maturity” said my sister. And so it is.
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Yesterday was the Feast Day of The Holy Trinity: a foundational belief of the Catholic doctrine and of the wider Catholic religion and faith. Father, Son and Holy Spirit: three distinct identities, forming one inscrutable but eternally-loving God. And six years ago, I listened to a sermon during a Mass celebrated on this day which caught my attention and which broadened my view of the people who make up the Catholic community, both the religious and the congregation.
It was a sermon delivered by the Parish Priest at the time and the gist of it was “The Holy Trinity is not a mathematical puzzle to be solved. God is Love and a Love which manifests itself in different ways within our lives. If we can understand this, and learn to see it and experience it in the day-to-day, we’ve learned and understood everything we need to about The Holy Trinity. It’s no more complicated than that.”
I’d never heard a Catholic priest preach in that way before. Nothing about evangelisation; nothing about the responsibility of our baptism; nothing about atoning for our sins, or denying ourselves in order to be of service to others. The message was Love and the message was clear: it’s present in our lives every day, we just need to grow the eyes and the awareness that allow us to see it. It was a minor moment of Enlightenment for me.
My mother was a religious woman and it was her decision that we should become a practising Catholic family, a decision that planted a seed in each of our lives, and one which each of us has cultivated and carried forward in different ways. She attended church regularly, helped out with community activities and volunteered at a Day Centre for the elderly. But she was also a passionate woman who lived a challenging life and, although she could be a challenging person herself to be around at times, her legacy of Love and her love of Life are things that I’ve come to appreciate more and more with each passing year.
Why did she plant the sapling? For Love. She loved what it represented about her past; she loved the idea of what it might become in the future; and she felt enough Love for herself to trust a small longing in her heart and what it was urging her to do…even if she never lived to see the splendour of that sapling’s full maturity.
We have a generational inheritance for a reason. It’s an evolutionary process and it gives us a choice. To carry forward and perpetuate disempowering traits passed on by our ancestors, or to choose a different, better, more healing path for ourselves, which honours and builds on the wisdom and strengths that they also possessed.
We feel a Spirit moving within us and around us for a reason. It’s a dynamic process and it has a purpose. Its purpose is to awaken in us the realisation that the realm of God, and all the promise that it holds, is closer than we think. It infuses all of our days in a myriad of ways and it calls on us continually to grow the eyes and the awareness to see it.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Faith, Hope and Love. Saplings planted by those who’ve gone before us, seeds that lie dormant within us. But the courage needed to cultivate them, we must find and grow for ourselves.
La Casa de Paz 