The fruit trees in my orchard have grown large enough now that I can’t tend them entirely on foot, though they still aren’t big enough to climb. I’m about due to purchase a fancy tripod orchard ladder, but for now, when I need to thin my apple crop, I lug a six-foot stepladder out from my garage, align it as best I can with our sloping ground, and wobble up into the tree, hoping I won’t break too many branches when I fall.
I reach for a cluster of applets, and a tiny spider of a type I have never seen crawls onto my sleeve. A heavy-bodied bug lands on a branch beside me. The breeze picks up, and leaves move all around me, brushing me on every side and exposing glimpses of clean sky above me. I am in another world. Although I am only six feet in the air, working in a tree that still barely rises above the level of a sapling, even the air looks different here.
Even a very small tree creates an ecosystem that does not exist in lower-lying vegetation. I would not have expected this young tree—and an inadequate ladder—to so quickly change my understanding of my garden. But now I know that any time I want to risk myself on that ladder, I will be in another world.
This week we celebrated the feast of Pentecost, celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples and the beginning of the Christian church. The events of that day were ecstatic: tongues of fire descending from heaven, a flood of speech in every language, mass conversions. My priest likes to comment on those events that you’ve got to love a religion that kicks off with the words “we’re not drunk!”
The point has been made before that Pentecost reverses the events of Babel: rather than human beings seeking to ascend to God, God comes down to them; rather than a confusion of language, universally comprehensible speech; rather than division, unity. A taste, just for a moment, of healing, real healing, come among us. Another world.
Pentecost is also known to English-speaking peoples by the name “Whitsunday.” Although nobody knows where the name comes from, I like the supposition that it’s linked to the word “wit,” as in understanding, information, ingenuity, skill. The gifts of the Holy Spirit—supernatural grants of wit, talents given for the healing of the world. Different theological traditions count the gifts of the Holy Spirit differently, and yet whether one endorses seven or twenty-five of these spiritual gifts, they have in common qualities of understanding, communication, and healing.
Rising into my apple tree, I do not receive such gifts, nor do I encounter tongues of flame. A knowledge of the ecosystem of a tree is not a gift of the Spirit. And yet God’s gifts of wit are general. “Wherever you turn your eyes,” says John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, “the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.”
I am not, by personality or theological tradition, the ecstatic type. Raised on the Plains, I have the emotional reserve of those people whom Garrison Keillor described as seeing you as in their personal space if you’re on the same carpet. I have never had to clarify that I was not drunk, at the third hour of the day or any other time. I do not particularly want to get outside myself. What I do want is another world.
Not another world in the sense that I would leave this one behind, not at all. I would not leave behind the tiny spiders, the unripe apples, the wind and the water and the fungal hyphae. But I do want another world like the world they tasted at Pentecost. A world of real healing, a common language, and a clean sky. How we need that.
Programming note: I have another garden essay published at the excellent journal Fare Forward this month. If you enjoy my writing, do head over there.