You might say I am rather fond of the Aspen tree (Populus tremuliodes). I like its slippery smooth silvery bark. I like its small heart shaped leaf, delicate, suspended on a flat petiole that lets every individual leaf tremble at the insinuation of a spring breeze. I like its soft creamy wood that yields to a sharp pocketknife like Edam cheese. I like its blazing yellow color that transforms the failing light of Autumn, its fragile black lace silhouette on the white hills of winter, its downy catkin fluff coating the spring roads like dance wax snow and its mist of Aspen syrup that sugar coats my truck on warm summer nights. I like everything about the Aspen tree. But most of all I like the way the Aspen grows.
In the rolling parkland of the Cariboo-Chilcotin Plateau, the Aspen never grows alone. It always lives with other Aspens, in community, in small groves. An Aspen grove is a delightful place to be. In fact we live in one, or rather a small one lives just outside of our bedroom window. Linda and I have been studying this Aspen grove in detail for the past 16 years. Every morning it is our habit to open our curtains and consume at least one cup of steaming dark coffee in silent reverie, staring at the Aspens that fill the window. In spring we marvel at the little Philadelphia Vireo — a tiny bird just yellowy-green enough that with its incessant flitting to and fro is able to completely disappear amidst the tender trembling foliage of the Aspen. In summer, perhaps attracted by the night's sweet Aspen mist, the Swallow-tailed Butterfly flits in and out of the foliage, some of which is now showing the gray trails of an almost microscopic insect, the Poplar Leaf Miner that earns its living excavating chlorophyll from the top surface of Aspen foliage. In autumn we watch the leaves slowly turn from green to golden yellow, sometimes almost orange, and we marvel at the way all kinds of wildlife seem to be attracted by the Aspen's warming glow. In winter we are often treated to the sight of a Ruffed Grouse bending the Aspen's branches to the point of snapping as it deftly nips off the hard grain-like nutritious buds to stoke its internal furnace against the harsh Cariboo winter. Truly an Aspen grove is a delightful place to be, a community that attracts.
There is something that amazes me about the Aspen that I never knew until recently. Although it was long suspected, with the advances of forest genetics foresters now know who is related to whom in an Aspen grove. And the neat thing is, in an Aspen grove almost everybody is related. It turns out that Aspens regenerate themselves more asexually, that is by shooting up from the roots below, rather than sexually from the formation of seeds above. This means that in an Aspen grove very often all the trees are tied into the same complex system of roots, and therefore share the same genetic material, the same life source, the same nutrition.
Today is Easter Sunday. It is my habit to spend some of this day reflecting alone. Today I happened by a place along a road that once had a nice grove of Aspens. It had been viciously slashed by a right of way clearing crew just a couple of years ago. Some bureaucrat several hundred miles away in the provincial capital must have deemed that it was now a policy to strip all vegetation from along roadsides. The slashing crew had cut down every last living Aspen stem and ground them into mulch in an attempt to fulfill some government bureaucrat's right of way maintenance contact to the last letter. I stopped and gazed at where the harmless Aspen grove had once graced the side of the road just two years before. What I saw made me smile. I had seen it many times before, in land clearing that had been left for a couple of years to rest before working the earth with disc and plow. The area was carpeted by a new grove of small healthy Aspens about a foot and a half tall. They were just bursting their buds with tiny new spring leaves, each individual tree coming up from the common root system below that had not been touched by the vicious slashing project. I smiled quietly, and in that infant grove of Aspens demonstrating a rebirth, a resurrection to new life from the common rootstock that nurtured a previous generation, the power of Easter was once again born into my own life, but this time with a difference.
The difference was for me, that this morning Easter became a community reality, a grove thing. Like most people who are a product of western culture and its doctrine of individualism, I have never had problems appropriating the power of the Easter resurrection as an individual thing; Christ was born for me, Christ died for me, Christ rose for me, Christ reigns for me. But this morning it was as though the Aspen grove was saying to me, "It's not all about you, David. Easter is first and foremost about the formation of a resurrection community, a grove of Christians with its roots from a common stock, the risen Christ, the first born from the dead, the first born of many, many brothers and sisters. (Romans 8: 29)
As I climbed back in the 4X4 pickup and left the Aspen grove I thought about the risen Christ. I thought about His resurrection appearances in the Bible and how all of them were to two or more people or for the direct benefit of two or more people. I thought about Jesus' words that looked forward to His resurrected presence with his followers in community: "For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them." (Matthew 18: 20) And the more I thought this Easter morning, the more that it was impressed upon me that the resurrection is all about the continued presence of the risen Christ in the formation of a community that seeks its life and unity from the common source, the risen Christ. We really are a grove of Christians rooted in the presence of the risen Christ. Like T.S. Elliot said: "There is no life that is not in community. And no community not lived in praise of God."
I have been a pastor now for nearly 22 years. The very first thing that I did when I was placed in my first rural church was to begin a small study and prayer group. Shortly we had five small study and prayer groups going in that little country church and the little church grew to the point of bursting its seems. To be honest I didn't have a clue what I was doing nor what was happening, I just knew that in my own experience I had felt Christ most powerfully present in small groups and so I expected most people who tried them would too. Apparently so. I even went as far as saying that each person's first church commitment was to their small group, and so if one had to miss something, miss church on Sunday morning not the small group. Colleagues in ministry thought I was nuts but people seldom missed Sunday morning church anyway. I was never one to put much stock in what colleagues thought about me nor much reflection into why things happen. This morning Aspen grove experience has changed the latter.
My Easter aspen grove experience has moved me to reflection and to share. Here is the product of that reflection. Wherever and whenever two or more meet in faith, potentially Christian community can freely exist, for it is a process of faith and gathering around the promised presence of the risen Christ, like on the road to Emmaus where the two disciples had their eyes open to the presence of the risen Christ. (Luke 24: 31) I believe that in the early church, the process of Christian community happened primarily in small groups, in small groves of Christians, not huge forests, to continue the Aspen metaphor. I believe that today it will continue to happen best in small groups. I believe that it is very hard for an intentional community of faith with the qualities of community described in Acts 2: 42 to develop outside of small groups. I believe that without small groups, congregations quickly become collectivities rather than faith communities. I believe Karl Jung was right when he analyzed large congregations so, and insisted that collectivities resulted in the lowering of consciousness of the individuals within it. The lowering of consciousness incapacitates community formation. And I believe that by continuing to focus on large forests of Christians instead of small groves, congregations instead of small groups, we actually feed people's desire to be anonymous and individualistic and are thus at cross purposes to the risen Christ who seeks to build intentional communities of faith rooted in him. I believe that until we learn this we will shrivel and starve to death as church rather than experience rebirth and new life. And I believe that another trip to the Aspen grove might just get me roasted as heretic within my own denomination, but hey, who cares!
