Our Marriage is Like a Pilgrimage

How nearly half a century of living with trees and Gwen influences me.

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash

Forty four years ago at 11:00 in the morning, I was married and my life was changed forever–forever, for the good. I read in the memoir of Ina Garten, the famous chef and TV personality cook, that one of her opening lines of her new book is “My life began with Jeffery” (Jeffrey is her husband.) It’s quiet a line isn’t it–because it’s not really true,  literally. This is not how a writer who is a chef writes. Her opening line is a line to let the reader know how absolutely important and life changing her encounter with her husband was that day they first met.

How would you say your life began?

I get it. 

I know Ina’s sentiment to be true as well.  It’s not been a fairy-tail, mind you. These years have taken bucket loads of forgiveness, the fertilizer of travel and adventure and the sheer hard work of deep pruning and uprooting so, so much that never should enter the glorious forest of a marriage. We just haven’t had a marriage. We had a working partnership in ministry and work—an unbelievable dimension that I do not recommend for anyone in marriage. But for us, it’s been our life and our pilgrimage. Over and over again, we chose to love—chose to remain anchored by vows we spoke and which we took seriously and held to the core in our hearts. What I am going to tell you below is that we needed more than vows to wade our way through muck and mire, muddiness of fights and misunderstandings. Now, that I look back on it, we needed trees—and lots of trees—lots of different kinds of trees and voices and leaves too aiding us onward, upward and forward.

Something in me shifted and has never shifted back since we were married on that fall day in 1980, when the leaves of the trees were changing on that sunny October day. We  had our reception under hundred year old oak trees outside the sanctuary of the church I pastored. Perhaps, those trees anchored us through all the storms, winds, changes and beautiful developments we have lived through in this near, a half a century of life together. How else can I explain it?

Life began under the trees. Could there be a better place to begin the journey than under a canopy of life; of green and hidden roots under the soil?

Our marriage began under the trees.  And so, on our 44th anniversary, we are going on a pilgrimage to a forest where some of the largest trees in the Eastern United States stand protected and made a sanctuary for pilgrims who are seeking the wisdom of trees, like we are. 

We have rented a cabin by a stream near the Joyce Kilmar Memorial Forest in a very remote corner of our State.  Joyce Kilmar wrote the poem, “Trees” that many of us learned, perhaps memorized in our high school years. Kilmar was a celebrated poet who was killed by a sniper’s bullet in World War I on the battlefield in France. He was the father of five children, one severely paralyzed by polio. His faith and his love of nature converged in his poems to offer us a great window into the beauty of nature and the sheer power of trees.

Our Anniversary pilgrimage will not be to the Holy Land of Israel. I have learned that all land is holy and our pilgrimage will take  us to these massive and beautiful trees where over 100 species of trees live–all protected from chain saws and noise. I’ve learned that chain saws are not allowed in this forest–only hand saws are used to clear the paths where pilgrims trek and seek. These are days, that both of us need quiet more than at any other time in our lives. The noise of the election; the evilness of lies; the anger in rhetoric reminds me of cutting, cutting chain saws. I need to get away from this. There is no life in this. None.

Hermann Hesse, another poet, scholar and familiar literary name to many of us, wrote a magnificent volume titled, “TREES.”  Here are the opening lines which may whet your appetite and make you want to become a pilgrim like we are:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”

We are taking three writers on our pilgrimage to read and study–three voices who make a Trinity to help us in our 44th year of marriage: Hermane Hesse, Wendell Berry and of course, Joyce Kilmar. Don’t worry, Mary Oliver goes along everywhere like a Third Testament for us as well. I’m sure Gwen will paint with the colors on her palette and I will write—both trying to express what is within our barked, scraped and still tender young souls.

Berry writes of the “tall timbered choir” referring to the glory of the trees on his farm in Kentucky. Kilmar writes that trees “look at God all day.” And in these voices and through these trees, we have the portals we need to see, taste and touch the Holy.

Trees have always been symbols of something beyond us. The Garden of Eden has the tree of life and ever since Eden, all of us are looking are pilgrims to make sense of the life we have been given and we find in the trees the promise of a future.

I don’t know about you but in these days of anxiety and bewilderment, nature is where I turn to now to help ground me–to help me find the ground of my own being.

(Last year, Gwen painted this multi-color and ever season changing tree for our anniversary. It sits in my workspace where I’m writing you today.)

Here’s my poem for Gwen on our Anniversary. The church we just joined here as its cemetery located in the National Forest near our home. In this place are the unmarked graves of slaves and where others have gone to rest from the chain saw cuts of life and noise. How fitting a place this might be to be laid to rest together.

(My poems on Substack are for those who subscribe to support my work here. I am so grateful to all who chose to read by work. But it is those of you who, with generosity and love, continue to cheer me on and to venture out and in to do what may become my most important work in my new voice and with my greening soul. We shall see.