O Lord God, You Know

 

 

Scripture Passage

 

There is a species of willow tree – Richardson’s willow – that thrives in thickets on stream banks and wet meadow ecosystems in the northlands.  Salix richardsonii likes alluvial plains where it finds water rich habitats, but it can also be found in distinctly more challenging places like the dry rocky outcrops and permafrost ecosystems above the arctic circle in Alaska and Canada.  It’s tough.  A  real survivor.   

When we are cold, we instinctively seek shelter.  But what do trees do?  Rooted to the earth, they can’t exactly get up and move behind the nearest rock.  

When we think “arctic” we think cold.  

And of course, cold is the greatest single challenge, but the cold is part of a whole spectrum of related issues that make survival exceedingly difficult.  

As it turns out, most creatures – plants and animals alike – like the sun…

Whether we admit it or not, we are all sun worshippers.

 But in the arctic, for much of the year, the sun rides below the horizon all day – it is, for all intents and purposes, just gone.  We think we have it bad, down here in New Hampshire!  In the arctic, the days get progressively shorter in September and in early October the world is in perpetual twilight, with the sun peeking over the horizon for a few minutes at midnight.  By mid-October it’s solid night, with no hope of dawn until the earth turns enough on its access to let in a sliver of early March sun.

This utter disappearance of the sun means that plants, that get their energy from photosynthesis find themselves in a very long lenten fast.  There is plenty of water present, and our tree could be nourished by it, if it wasn’t frozen solid.  The perpetual wind from the ocean – made more frigid by the darkness – dries the tree’s limbs.  

How does our tough friend, the Richardson Willow get through?  

In his book Arctic Dreams, author and naturalist Barry Lopez, writes:

… a tree, like an animal, needs heat to carry on it’s life processes.  Solar radiation provides this heat, but in the arctic there is a strong correlation between this warmth and closeness to the ground.

In other words, the Richardson Willow keeps it’s head down.  The farther north you go, the shorter they are – clustered in low lying thickets on south facing hillsides.  Above a certain latitude, they just can’t survive, and the landscape devolves to tundra and then ice. 

In addition to hugging the earth for warmth, our willow responds to the long winter in the same way that most arctic plants and animals do… by going into a dormant state that requires less energy to sustain. 

Can you imagine anything more like salvation than watching the sunrise in March, and feeling the heat from the sun for the first time in 5 months?  In my imagination that would not be like salvation… it would be salvation! 

But, if you can believe it, the arrival of the arctic summer is not the end of our little willow’s troubles. 

Because of the permafrost (permanently frozen soil that is a few feet beneath the tundra), the summer runoff has nowhere to drain and the Richardson Willow finds itself wallowing in a bog. 

 In order to make use of the sudden wealth of water, and not just drown, the little guy must make a rapid switch from dormancy to full tilt mode.  

**

 God said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” 

 **

Have you ever heard of a Hydrothermal vent?

I’m not a geologist, and neither are you (as far as I know) so I’m going to try and talk about this in everyday speech.  I may get some details wrong, but I hope I’ll get the essence right.

A hydrothermal vent is a phenomenon that occurs on the ocean floor – usually between 8000 and 13000 feet below the surface of the sea – where the massive tectonic plates are perpetually rubbing up against each other in the act of creating the Ea

rth’s crust.

All the seismic at the mid ocean ridges creates hotspots where the water from the ocean seeps down into the mantle of the earth, and comes into contact with magma – molten rock that is like lava.  This water goes through all kinds of interesting chemical changes that I cannot even begin to understand.  Ultimately, the water, now superheated, comes spewing back up through the earth’s crust and, as it hits the cold ocean water, the minerals condense, creating these massive calcified towers that look like smoke stacks rising from the ocean floor.   

We didn’t know about all this until 1949, when someone saw something strange going on in the Red Sea and decided to investigate.  Most Hydrothermal Vents are hard to research because humans cannot get even close to that depth without being crushed by the pressure.  Once again, we find ourselves in a place where the sun never shines.   More recently, deep sea submersibles have allowed scientists to learn more about them.

And guess what we found out?

The mineral rich fluid that hisses up through the vents is up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit.  , but when this mixes with the cold seawater, the resulting temperature attracts all manner of deep sea critters.   There are six foot long worms that have no mouth or digestive tract, but just float around absorbing the chemicals that they need from the vent.  There are the recently discovered Yeti Crabs, so called because they are pale and covered with silky hair that makes them look like an abominable snowman.  In the neighborhood of one Hydrothermal a colony of eels was found that was populace enough that the scientists named it Eel city.

Amazingly, there is one critter – a form of bacteria, if I’m understanding what I read – that was discovered in the wall of a hydrothermal vent itself.  Methanopyrus kandleri which was only discovered in 2005 holds the record for being the world’s most extreme hyperthermophile, or heat loving organism.  can survive in conditions of up to 250 degrees fahrenheit.  

**

 God said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” 

**

I found myself wandering up into the arctic circle, and swimming around 5000 feet under the sea, because I was thinking about Ezekial’s vision.

In his vision, he finds himself in a valley of bones.

Not just bones, but dry bones.

I love that detail.

To me that detail can only mean one thing – that these bones were not just dead… they were very dead.

They’ve been dead for a while.

And the best thing about those very dead bones, was that when they started to move, in Ezekial’s vision… they rattled.

While I was thinking about those dry bones, this week, I happened to be standing at the window beside my woodstove, looking out into the backyard – as I often do – and I found myself inspecting our Norway Maple.  Our Norway Maple has not gotten the memo about the first day of Spring.  It still looks like it did in January.  All sad and naked with limbs sticking every which way into the sky.

In a way the winter trees resemble a skeleton.

Winter trees are a bit like a skeleton because when you look at them you can see the underlying structure of something that, when filled out with leaves, becomes something with an entirely different shape and meaning.

Ezekiel’s valley of bones has always struck me as a very unique and rather frightening vision – a kind of mystical experience that exists outside the frame of normal human life.

But looking at the winter trees in this way, I thought that this idea of bones coming back to life was perhaps not as far out and mystical as we might think.  We could also understand it – death coming back to life – as something that literally happens around us all the time.

Though we are in the midst of it – we ourselves are living.

Though we are surrounded by living things.

Though life is unstoppable beyond measure.

It…

Life

is the ultimate

the ultimate miracle.

God said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” 

**

I once showed an old friend some pictures that I had taken while I was walking alone on the western coast of Scotland.

I remember that experience – walking beside the cliffs, looking down at the surf forever battering the headlands; watching, a little further out the muscular ebb and surge of the tide; feeling the buffeting of the wind that came in off the North Atlantic; watching the sun appear and disappear in the clouds above the ocean – I remember that experience as one single feeling of prolonged wonder.  A joy that was almost impossible to contain within the frame of my small mortality.  It was like swimming in eternity.  It was like walking with God.

I said as much to my friend.

He said something to me that was simple but true.  I have since quoted him often.

“We live on the best planet!”

It’s true.

We do.

We live on the best planet.

Barry Lopez, whose book Arctic Dreams, provided me with everything I have told you about our tough little friend the Richardson Willow, wrote something amazing about the wee tree, that I have held off telling you about till now…

 Trees in the arctic have an aura of implacable endurance about them. he wrote.  A cross section of the bole of a Richardson willow no thicker than your finger may reveal 100 annual growth rings beneath the magnifying glass.

This diminutive tree, crouching against the ground on the arctic tundra – this sun starved, wind blown, nutrient hungry, water deprived, water logged little willow, reveals its amazing  secret.  One hundred years hidden in a finger’s breadth.

This resilience – this life – is so beautiful it makes we want to cry.

And there is something else also about the Hypothermal Vents at the bottom of the ocean.

Though it is not unanimous, it appears that many scientists believe that the combination of fossil evidence and the unique conditions that exist in the hypothermal vents point to the possibility that life on this planet may have originated in this habitat.

God said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” 

Amen.