Tree Pearls

 My friend the artist,  Bear Claw Jack, gave me an unusual piece of a tree--an American Elm burl. Jack usually transforms such pieces into turtles, but this one was for me. (I promised him a pen from it, but that wasn't part of his giving it to me.) I have long admired burls on trees; there is a huge one on a tree on Jefferson Road that I have ogled for many years, but I have never had one. I have seen many beautiful things made from burls; but now I could make some really unusual pen bodies and who knows, maybe something else.

I felt like a desecrator when I put this treasure on my table saw to cut right through its center; but I did it anyway. I had never seen anything quite like these segments of the heart of the burl. I then sawed some ¾ inch pieces to turn into pen bodies.The next step, drilling and gluing in the tubes completed, I turned one piece down on my lathe and the result was amazing. The beautifully unique was now the uniquely beautiful. I pressed the pen parts into the body and thought about how a pen can be more than just a pen--more than just an object with which to write. Nearly everyone I showed the pen to agreed upon its beauty. Beyond skilled craftsmanship this was a work of art, the Master Artist’s creation.

Burls are unusual growth formations on tree exteriors; they are excrescences, but their origin is from within the tree. As a clam secretes a protective substance to surround a grain of sand or some other foreign object’s damaging presence within, so a tree reacts to a wound or stress from an object or weather by spalting inside, or burling on the outside. The result in both cases is a strange but beautiful formation. Burls are tree pearls.

Burls are also great testimony to something much deeper and larger. There is an underlying and not often articulated assumption among conservative Christians that the Creator forsook creation after the Fall and His pronouncement of curse upon earth's soil. Many people might not realize this but it is there. Why else would we/they sing, “The earth will soon dissolve like snow…” (Amazing Grace-My Chains Are Gone) Or, why would we think that Peter’s apocalyptic language about earth and fire means the final destruction of the planet?  Why would conservative Christians eschew ecology initiatives and “poo- poo” global warming etc.? Yes the assumption is there and, there are those who blatantly state that God abandoned the planet but not the people on it when sin entered the world. Burls are beautiful affirmations to the contrary.

In the Pre-fallen world, burls would not have existed, and neither would pearls. The beauty of the burl demonstrates redemption. Christ the Redeemer has rescued fallenness, not only of persons, but Creation--Planet Earth. This can be seen in manifold ways; I will just stay with burls.  It is a universal truth that all things are of  Christ, through Christ, and to Christ. He is also the cohesive of all, from the atom to the universe as well as everything in between. Burls and pearls would not be beautiful were not this redemption already set in motion and in full operation, moving toward the consummation of history. This is not the result of some impersonal force of nature and time--it is because the Word who was in the beginning, who was with God and was God created a universe and a planet that he loved and refused to give over or abandon. This is the personal, ongoing involvement of the Word who became flesh; it is not just residual from origin. Thank You, God, for burls and their beauty, as well as friends who give such to me, and the truths they inspire. My cup runneth over.