Forgive the Trees: A Meditation on the Coming of Spring

The first day of spring was just a few days ago, but it never truly feels like spring to me until the leaves return. I am always astounded by the fact that one day, the landscape is drab and bare, and then the next day—seemingly without any warning at all—the brown branches are peppered with light green. The trees do not ask permission to come back to life, and somehow, they manage to do so all at once, as if by collusion. Everything that was dead just hours ago is suddenly alive. Resurrection and springtime, it seems, really do go hand in hand.

Perhaps it is because of my yearning for the return of the leaves that I was so struck when I recently read Ada Limón’s “Instructions on Not Giving Up” for the first time. The poem, delightful in its simplicity, reads as follows:

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Upon reading this poem for the first time several weeks ago, I found instant kinship with Limón in our shared response to the first leaves of spring: it truly is “the greening of the trees that really gets to me.” Limón and I, of course, are not alone in this sentiment. The greening of spring is such a vivid image that it has inspired countless poets to take up their pens and innumerable artists to stain their hands. There is something in the leaves that restores our vision; in the light of a spring sun, we see the world again as if for the very first time.

One could argue that this response is, at its heart, physiological. There are scientific reasons, after all, that humans tend to experience seasonal depression during the winter. The greyness of the sky, the biting cold of the wind, and the long darkness of winter days affect our bodies on a chemical level. But Limón’s little springtime poem hints at a mystery more complex than brain chemistry, a more fundamental reason why the greening of the trees brings us back to life. Perhaps there is some great secret buried within the roots of the trees, woven into the budding flowers—and if you will take a moment to ponder the mystery of the leaves with me, you may find that this secret has something to do with forgiveness.

Dostoevsky and Bearing the Weight of the World

If you were to stop a stranger on the street and ask them to tell you what forgiveness is, they would probably define forgiveness as something like “the act of letting go of one’s resentment or bitterness toward an offender.” In this common understanding, forgiveness is what happens when someone has wronged you. Instead of harboring ill will against the person who has done you harm, you might choose to let go of that ill will. By doing so, you are forgiving the trespasses of your offender. Another common, related definition of forgiveness has to do with ignoring debts. If someone owes you money, you might forgive that person’s debt, meaning that your debtor no longer needs to pay back the money they owe you. In both of these cases, there is an outstanding obstacle to the relationship between two people. In the first case, the obstacle is a grievance; in the second, it is a debt. Forgiveness, then, is the path to restoring your relationship with a particular person—at least, that is the way most of the world tends to think about forgiveness.

But in his famous novel The Brothers Karamazov, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky paints forgiveness in an entirely different light. In one portion of the novel, Dostoevsky tells the story of a young man who undergoes a dramatic conversion experience as a result of his own terminal illness. This character, who was once a selfish, unsavory personality, becomes gentler, more loving, and more gracious toward the world as he draws closer and closer to death. As his death comes ever nearer, the young man begins to ask forgiveness—but the surprising part is that he does not merely ask forgiveness from the people he has sinned against, of whom there are many. Instead, he broadens his horizons and he beg the whole world to forgive him. Remembering this story later in life, the young man’s brother recounts:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side—a little happier, anyway—and children and all animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin.

In this passage, Dostoevsky argues that forgiveness is not merely the path to mending a broken relationship, but that it is rather the secret that lies at the heart of the whole world. According to Dostoevsky, every one of us must take on the burden of all the sins of the world. In other words, you must bear not only the weight of your own sin and suffering, but the weight of the sin of your friends, of your neighbors, of every stranger you have ever passed on the street. He thinks that once you have taken on the combined weight of all the sins of all mankind upon your shoulders, then you must turn and ask the whole world to forgive you—and in this mystical act, all the sins of the world will be forgiven. If you willingly accept guilt on behalf of all and for all, then you earn the right to ask everyone in the world to forgive you, and you in turn can forgive everyone and everything in the world.

In Dostoevsky’s own words, such a perspective “sounds senseless.” It might seem like a noble sentiment, but what could it possibly mean in reality? How could you actually take upon yourself the weight of the sins of the world? And even if you could manage it practically, how could you—being human—bear so much weight without being crushed? These questions, however, take Dostoevsky’s perspective on forgiveness too literally. What Dostoevsky describes in The Brothers Karamazov is a posture of humility: a willingness to bear the weight of sin and suffering wherever one encounters it, and then to let that weight go again through the act of forgiveness.

Here is an example. Let’s say that you are unjustly accused of a sin that you did not commit. Perhaps a friend accuses you of hurting her feelings with a thoughtless comment; perhaps your child accuses you of being too controlling; perhaps your supervisor snaps at you for performing a task incorrectly. But in reality, your comment to your friend was both true and necessary; you were protecting your child from real, immediate danger; you completed the task in exactly the way that your supervisor instructed. The truth is that your friend, your child, and your supervisor are wrestling with their own doubts and demons, and they have channeled that hurt into their complaints against you. In the face of these unjust accusations, what will you do?

Maybe you argue with them. Maybe you explain yourself. Maybe you justify your actions, taking the time to delineate exactly why you were not wrong to do and say what you did and said—but in the process of justifying yourself, perhaps you lose sight of the hurt that led to those accusations in the first place. Your accuser is in pain, just like everyone else in this broken world. By justifying your actions, you might preserve your self-image, but you have not convinced your accuser. More importantly, you have not succeeded in making the pain go away, and in the process, you have only deepened the rift between yourself and your accuser.

But what if you were to shoulder the full weight of the accusation, just or not? What if you were to bear not only your own sin, but the sin of your accuser as well? What if you were to swallow your pride, bury your self-justifications, and ask for forgiveness instead? If you have ever done this, then you already know the power that lies behind this simple course of action. Somehow, miraculously, this kind of forgiveness moves mountains, heals unimaginable pain, brings the dead back to life again. By taking responsibility for your accuser’s pain, by accepting guilt on behalf of all and for all, you can take on the burden of the sins of the world—and by asking forgiveness, you can participate in the absolution of those sins. In this one small way, you can take up your cross and follow in the footsteps of Christ, who also begged his Father to forgive sins that he did not commit.   

Forgive the Trees

Winter is cruel. Ruthless in its rending cold and plodding greyness, the darkest season reminds us that we are the kind of creatures who die. In winter, we feel the urge to hibernate, to hide from the evil of the world. Nothing could be worth another day of chilly drabness; to borrow the words of Limón’s poem, nothing could possibly make up for “whatever winter did to us.” As the cold March days drag on, we ourselves become the accusers, pointing a finger at the infernal bleakness of the brown horizons that surround us.

But in the end, it is not the winter that we are angry at, but God. Our hands clenched tightly into fists, we cast a myriad of accusations up at our Creator. We cry out that we never asked to be made like this. We did not cause the winter, but still we suffer within it.

And yet, every spring, there is the greening of the leaves—the event that Limón calls “a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite / the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.” We who cursed the bare branches now find ourselves reaching out in wonder to touch the tiny new leaves. The dead have been raised to life again, and perhaps we now feel ashamed of how we shook our fists at the sky in the dead of winter, when it seemed that spring might never come.

And joy of all joys, the leaves never justify themselves, never explain their long absence in haughty self-righteousness. The trees never point their fingers back at us and accuse us of eating the apple, of bringing death into the world. Instead, their growing branches lift toward the sky, pointing at the God who bore the weight of human suffering on his own back. In their resurrection, the leaves forgive us for the force of our anger, the injustice of our accusations.

“Fine then, I’ll take it,” Christ whispers in the voice of the trees, their fist-like buds “unfurling…to an open palm” and surrendering to the mercy of their accusers. There is, after all, a reason that Easter always comes in the spring—and this Easter, looking up into a blue sky for the first time in months, perhaps we too will open our palms in surrender, beg the world to forgive us, and repeat after the trees: “I’ll take it all.”

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