New Book Now Available - Prologue
Chewing the Cud: A Devotional Rumination on God, Man, and World
As promised, I will continue to publish some of the beginning sections and chapters of my newly released book, Chewing the Cud: A Devotional Rumination on God, Man, and World here on Substack. If you’d like to support my work, please pick up a copy on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4lkSMUs. I have also made the Preface available for free here:
Below you will find the Prologue.
Then He said to me, “Son of man, eat this scroll, and go and speak to the children of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he fed me the scroll. Then He said to me, “Son of man, your mouth shall eat and your stomach will be filled with this scroll that is given you.” So I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. Then He said to me, “Son of man, go! Go to the house of Israel, and speak My words to them.”
—Ezekiel 3:1-4
The scroll must first be eaten before it returns to the mouth to be chewed as cud. Like a ruminant returning to its meal, we too are beckoned to draw compounding nourishment from God’s revelation—that we might always be poised to share His spiritual food with others. In this prologue, then, I offer a broad, reflective sketch of central biblical themes. What follows is by no means comprehensive, but a brief series of impressions—hors d’oeuvres—meant to awaken the palate with a taste of the meal to come. I have found that a devotional mode of rumination—slowly returning to the same forms, again and again, each time at a different level—is the surest way to the sanctuaries of their inner significance. Though less immediate than linear paths of reasoning, chewing the cud follows a trajectory along the very concentric layers of meaning that give living shape to truth itself, drawing us toward the inner divine core of beings, where communion with their Source illumines the one who meets Him there. This Light is Christ, the Logos, in whom all things cohere.
Glory to Him who stands at the door and knocks, and who, if we hear His voice and open the door, will come in and dine with us.
God the Gardener and the Trees He Planted
In the very midst He planted
the Tree of Knowledge,
endowing it with awe,
hedging it in with dread,
so that it might straight way serve
as a boundary to the inner region of Paradise.
Two things did Adam hear
in that single decree:
that they should not eat of it
and that, by shrinking from it,
they should perceive that it was not lawful
to penetrate further, beyond that Tree.1
—St. Ephrem the Syrian
After completing His creation and pronouncing it good—indeed, very good—God planted a garden in Eden and placed Adam there to keep it, cultivate it, and scatter its holy seed across the earth’s fertile soil—to be watered by the four rivers streaming from its heart. There, within this verdant Temple, the Lord commissioned Adam, as His living icon, to sanctify the world, to mark it out as sacred space for the expansion of His Kingdom. God’s presence there as Person was the fount of its holiness; but through man’s living communion with Him in the garden, that holiness was meant to flow outward—like blood flowing through veins—carrying the oxygen of Eden’s spiritual air to the four corners of heaven. God created man as a priest, to be a faithful mediator between Himself and the rest of creation; He willed to perfect the world in collaboration with man, and, in so doing, to perfect man himself. Being spiritually refined through celebrating the liturgy of Paradise, he was to be made fit to don the crown as God’s righteous vice-regent. Receiving the wisdom and vision of a prophet through this obedience, humanity was then to raise up the world as a temple holy to the Lord, setting all of creation into the sacred order of worship and maintaining its dynamic balance of harmony by centering his heart in God, and God in his heart. And were Adam to have sanctified all the earth, perhaps God’s paradise would itself have become a seed, of cosmic proportions, for planting gardens in other worlds.
Thus, God dwelled in the garden as a Father to Adam, raising him as His beloved son—a living tree He would cultivate into His perfect likeness; and the first fruit He harvested was Eve. United now as husband and wife in communion with God, they were called to be one living tree, together nourished by the fruit of every tree in the garden—save only the one that had been withheld from them. God gave them a Law: “You may eat from every tree of the garden; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you may not eat; for in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16–17). As a loving Parent raising His children to maturity and guiding them into the fullness of their vocation as His iconic representatives—His prophetic priest-kings over all creation—God gave this commandment not as a mere test, nor as an arbitrary exercise of control, but as a catalyst for their ascent into godhood by grace. He created a good world, void of sin and evil, and gave it as a gift to His children, imbuing them with the capacity to grow together in communion with Him through the sacrament of creation, and to deepen their knowledge of that creation through this communion, becoming His creative vice-gardeners of holiness. This commandment, then, was not an absolute prohibition, but the first stirrings of His revelation, tracing the sacred order of man’s ascent toward his God-given end as king. And as all wise parents remind their children when they long for the crown of adulthood: all comes in due time.
But alas, the garden’s harvest yield became bittersweet.
For man seized the fruit of that tree, not yet allowed him, grasping the kingly reins of spiritual adulthood before the ripening of his maturity, and thus severed himself from the wellspring of life: communion with God in the Spirit of holiness. And so, the Lord, in His infinite providential wisdom and mercy, sent man out from the garden, barring his access to the Tree of Life, lest he seal himself eternally in the severed state of delusional pride into which he had fallen. At the gates of exile, He clothed Adam and Eve with garments of mortal skin, that they might strive in humility and repentance, growing spiritually through their struggle toward death.
Thus did the Lord, in His foresight, ordain the exile of His children—not to condemn them, but to prepare the fallow ground of their hearts for the long pilgrimage back to the garden of Paradise. But humanity would not take up its cross, nor follow the path of purification appointed by God. Rather than emanating holiness through faithful obedience and communion with God, man propagated corruption by continual surrender to the tyranny of his passions. For, “[t]here is a road that seems to be right with men, [b]ut the ends of it reach into the depths of Hades” (Prov. 14:12).
After Adam’s expulsion from the garden and Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, Cain was estranged from the earth’s bounty by God’s curse, chastened as a call to repentance for the sake of reconciliation. But driven from the land, he turned instead to build a city, striving to circumvent the restorative justice of God and to wrest prosperity by his own hand, thereby sealing himself in alienation. Cain’s rebellion was not merely a repetition of his father’s, but an escalation of it—a willful attempt to secure by force what Adam had once grasped out of due time. As generation gave way to generation, mankind reaffirmed Cain’s pattern of spurning the Lord’s will, raising cities and leveraging technology to forge a path divergent from his natural purpose of communion with God and his royal vocation as priest-king; and instead of humbly returning to the garden to build the Lord’s paradisiacal Kingdom under divine authority, he fashioned one in his own image.
Having abandoned the heavenly pattern of Paradise for another—one enclosed and entropic—man’s heart, with it, descended into darkness, until “every intent of the thoughts within his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5).
But God was not without a remnant: Noah and his family found grace before the Lord, becoming the means through whom He would preserve His creation within the ark—that microcosmic seed of the new world—through its cleansing by flood and recreation.
With the light of dawn shining through the ark’s unsealed doors, the feet of man once again lighted upon the solid ground atop a mountain—the fragile summit of a world reborn, echoing Eden’s own heights, out of which the river of life once flowed into all the earth.
And thus Noah, commissioned by God as the new Adam, received from Him this blessing:
Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and have dominion over it. For the dread and fear of you shall be upon all the wild animals of the earth, all the birds of heaven, all that move upon the earth, and all the fish of the sea. I have put them under your authority (Gen. 9:1–2).
Having emerged from the baptismal waters of the flood, Noah was anointed as the royal and priestly steward of the creation reborn. Yet the ancient wound of man’s soul lay hidden still in the soil of his heart.
In the postdiluvian world, Noah raised up an altar and made whole burnt offerings to the Lord, who was pleased to smell their sweet aroma. These offerings were reminiscent of Abel’s, which God had honored and accepted, unlike those of his brother Cain. Until this point, Noah’s recapitulation of Adam’s divine sonship had remained without blemish. Venturing from the mountaintop upon which he had communed with God, Noah set his hands to the cultivation of the earth and the expansion of Paradise: he planted a vineyard. But when he drank the fruit of his labor as strong wine, Noah overindulged, and fell into a drunken stupor within his tent. Seizing upon his father’s vulnerability, Ham uncovered his father’s nakedness—an ancient euphemism for lying with his wife—seeking thereby to usurp his paternal headship. But upon discovering Ham’s incestuous transgression against his own mother, Noah pronounced a curse upon Canaan, the child begotten of his father’s sin. Just as once God had cursed the serpent in Eden—who spiritually violated Adam’s wife, and by extension, his seed—so Noah pronounced judgment upon the descendants of Ham for the fleshly violation of his own wife. In the case of both Ham and the serpent, the self-willed attempt to subvert a father’s authority met with swift and solemn justice.
Diverging from the path of repentance laid out before Adam by God, and heeding instead the spirit of Cain’s rebellious city-building before the flood, postdiluvian man once more set himself against the divine command to fill the earth, gathering together as one people, in one place, to build a city and a tower reaching up toward heaven: Babel, in the plain of Shinar. Their ambition was to forge a name for themselves, lest they be “scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11:4; emphasis added). Indeed, such a plan stood in direct defiance of the commission God gave to Adam: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of heaven, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28; emphasis added); and again to Noah: “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth and have dominion over it” (Gen. 9:1; emphasis added). In his disobedience, man by his own hand sought to seize power as king—fashioning creation into a temple of his own vanity and pride, and thus pronouncing himself god not only over himself, but over all of heaven and earth, which are God’s throne and footstool. For the tower they purposed to build was no mere work of earthly beauty, but an idolatrous temple—through which they presumed to draw down divine power by ritual magic. This vainglorious abandon in the spirit of rebellion, the seed of all paganism, has ever found willing slaves among every tribe, tongue, and nation. But God—just as He once expelled Adam from the garden for his own spiritual good and maturation—came down to disrupt the construction of that city and tower called Babel, confusing man’s unified language and scattering him across the face of the earth. Once again, in accordance with His steadfast love, God stretched forth His merciful hands to His beloved image-bearers, preventing their complete self-destruction. For as long as man has wandered the desert of history, the eternal Son has interceded with the Father: “[F]orgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34).
Indeed, even amid the wasteland wreckage of spiritual desolation left by Noah’s fractured descendants, God once again called forth one faithful among humanity—Abram—whom He would not merely beckon back toward Paradise, but to whom He would bestow the gift of His promise: His very Word.
Despite His long-term plan to restore humanity, beginning by cutting a covenant with Abram, much of history after God’s scattering the proud from Babel has taken the form of repeated attempts to reconstruct the Tower. Amid man’s imperial quest for dominion over the earth, chaos ensued: the angels God set over the nations corrupted themselves, empires rose and fell in competition for power, heroes established cities, deified by their descendants, but were unwilling and unable to mend the spiritual decimation of man. Thus time would lie in ruin until the coming of its Redeemer. In this way, just as He began with Adam and continued with Noah, God recommenced His plan to remake the world, to bring man back into His paradisiacal garden and restore him to communion with Himself: He called Abram out from the world, Ur of the Chaldeans, guiding him on a pilgrimage into a new land which He promised to give his seed, and then ultimately to make of him a people called by His name—to be priests and kings in relation to the nations of the earth, to sanctify and steward them back into the garden of God, recapitulating the commission He originally gave Adam.
Not only did the Lord bring Abram into a land flowing with milk and honey and give him many descendants, but He also providentially ensured that, in the fullness of time, a particular line of those descendants would culminate in Christ, God incarnate, who would bless all the nations. In truth, the blessing of Christ will ultimately be realized through the synergy between God and man in complete living union, climaxing as the transformation and ascension of all creation into the dynamic form of eternal perfection for which it was made. God’s words, including His promises to Abraham, carry such a wealth of significance that they span the full breadth, length, height, and depth of reality. Rarely can one perceive their full scope from a limited human perspective within time, yet He always reveals what is necessary to those who are faithful to Him, for He says: “I will give you understanding, and I will teach you in the way you should walk; I will fix My eyes on you” (Ps. 31:8). So, with Abraham and Sarah both advanced in years, they did not expect to be fertile, for circumstance seemed an unsurpassable barrier, but nonetheless God—the One for whom all things are possible—had promised them a son. While they were dwelling at the Oak of Mamre, God visited them with two angels and reaffirmed this promise, first having His feet washed, sharing a meal with the angels, and then speaking personally with Abraham and Sarah—an image of hospitality and fellowship, echoing God’s fellowship with Adam in the garden and portending its future restoration. Perhaps out of impatience to see the fruit of God’s promise, Sarah directed Abraham to take her maidservant as a wife, that through Hagar she might obtain this child. Abraham complied, and Hagar bore him a son, whom they named Ishmael. This impulsive act echoes Adam and Eve’s premature seizure of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—grasping, out of due order, what God would have eventually granted them in the fullness of time; and in heeding his wife’s counsel in this scheme, Abraham partook of Adam’s failure to exercise the responsible authority entrusted to him as a husband, to shepherd his household in obedience to the Lord. Conceived in this way, Ishmael was not the child God had promised, nor would he receive first-born status in the particular genealogical line through which Christ would come—He who is first-born of all creation. Yet the Lord, in His steadfast love and mercy, blessed Ishmael greatly in the broader scope of His covenantal relationship with Abraham.
Finally, according to God’s immutable word and covenant faithfulness, Sarah, through Abraham, conceived and bore Isaac, the child and heir of the promise. And through this sacred lineage, the promised Seed, hidden in the soil of history, would, in time’s full flower, spring forth as a shoot from the womb of the Holy Virgin, blossoming as the world’s Redemption.
Before Abraham died, discerning the spiritual corruption of the peoples among whom he sojourned—enthralled by the iniquitous religion of the fallen sons of God—he sent an oath-bound servant back to the land of his kindred to secure a wife for his son Isaac. With an angel before him and the wind of the Spirit at his back, the servant entered the land and, finding a well, bowed down in prayer. But before his prayer had arisen, Isaac’s future wife, daughter of Nahor, the brother of Abraham, approached: Rebekah.
Here and in each subsequent generation, God’s providential hands are made manifest, tilling the ground of history, preparing its soil to receive the Seed of His Word, who would bless the nations: not merely with an abundance of the earth’s bread and wine, but with His own body and blood—the food and drink of immortality. There was indeed an earthly layer to the Lord’s promise, first fulfilled in the exodus of Israel from Egypt, their founding as His holy nation, and their pilgrimage through the wilderness into the land of Canaan—an arc that culminated in the establishment of a kingdom under God, with Saul first crowned on the head, but David within the spirit.
Yet God’s purpose for this earthly fulfillment was, within history, to sow the Seed into the fertile ground of the Virgin, whose Son, the Incarnate Word, transposed the old patterns and types into a spiritual octave: the exodus of His faithful flock from the world under the dominion of the evil one; their founding as the Church, His living Body; and their pilgrimage through the wilderness of time and death into eternity, culminating in the establishment of God’s Kingdom: His cosmic Garden-Temple-City.
For as St. Paul discerned the Spirit’s whisper in the biblical witness, he proclaimed: “Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘And to your Seed,’ who is Christ” (Gal. 3:16).
And so it was through Isaac that the promise took root, and through Jacob, it became a tree of twelve branches: the patriarchs of Israel. Beneath the clamorous beat of time, the soft, sacred symphony of God’s redemption continued to unfold in the lives of His people.
Among these twelve, Joseph was gifted with prophetic dreams and consecrated to become the vessel of salvation for his kin, yet a thread of pride ran through his budding soul. Though tainted by a glimmer of pride inherited from Adam, Joseph would walk the sacred path of return to the Garden, the way of sanctification laid before him by God.
Marked by divine favor, he became the object of his brothers’ envy—a visceral echo of that primordial envy by which the serpent, beholding Adam’s exalted potential, sought to corrupt him and divert the blessing God had bestowed.
Thus Jacob, blind to the gathering filial storm, sent Joseph—his favored son and most trusted eye—to spy out his brothers, who were away tending their father’s flock. And when they beheld Joseph approaching, clad in his coat of many colors, their smoldering envy burst into open conspiracy: just shy of shedding his blood with their own hands, they resolved to abandon him in a pit. But as they lingered, there passed before them a procession of Ishmaelite traders on their way to Egypt, and their murderous frenzy gave way to a treachery more subtle: after Reuben’s protest and Judah’s counsel, they sold their brother for silver, consigning him to the bonds of slavery in Pharaoh’s kingdom. By the transcendent wisdom of divine Providence—who, in His bottomless mercy, draws good even from the deep well of human wickedness—Joseph was exiled from the land by his brothers, but on their behalf, for the preservation of life through the years of famine to come.
Refined through many fiery trials, Joseph became a special instrument of God’s abundant love shed abroad. As a prophet, he deciphered Pharaoh’s troubling dreams—not only to foretell the coming famine, but to preserve through it his father, his brothers, their families, and all Egypt besides. For this, he was lifted to Pharaoh’s right hand and entrusted with dominion over his kingdom, so that through his wise stewardship, all might be delivered from impending starvation.
The story of Joseph unfolds with layers of typological meaning, echoing patterns that cascade across the sacred history of salvation. What emerges most clearly is this: God consistently uses exile as a providential means of pouring out His mercy and preserving life—and then, through exodus, draws His people back to Himself in a spiritually refined and ultimately glorified form of being. Tracing the shape of God’s longsuffering mercy from the beginning reveals the sacred rhythm of exile and return, suffering and repentance, through which salvation is mysteriously wrought: the effecting of the transfiguration of man and cosmos alike.
Selah.
Adam was exiled from the Garden—clothed in garments of skin—lest, having opposed his will to God’s, he reach forth his hand to the Tree of Life and seal himself forever in living death. Noah was exiled from the old world by the flood, borne through the waters of judgment and recreation in an ark, that vessel of divine mercy, until his feet touched back down upon the mountain of God. Abraham was exiled from his homeland, called by the Word of the Lord on a covenantal pilgrimage, to become the wellspring of a divinely blessed people. Joseph was exiled into Egypt, that through his affliction and ascent to kingly glory, his father’s house—and the nations round about—might be preserved alive during the seven years of famine that covered the whole earth. Moses was exiled from Egypt, fleeing to Midian, where he beheld God in the flame of a burning bush at Mount Horeb and, at the behest of divine command, returned to shepherd his enslaved people in their exodus toward the land of covenantal promise. David, anointed by God yet cast into exile by Saul’s envious fury, sojourned in the wilderness among a faithful remnant, where he was tested and refined through suffering, until at last he was crowned king, becoming the chosen vessel of Israel’s deliverance from the idolatrous nations round about.
And in the fullness of time, Christ—the incorruptible Seed in whom death is trampled, from whom grace is sown and life harvested, and through whom the Garden of God is not only restored, but blossoms into the everlasting Temple-City of the Heavenly Jerusalem—was revealed, with healing in His wings, as the Sun of Righteousness rising in the darkness of history.
As the broad pattern of redemption spiraled upward toward its consummation in Christ, its sacred rhythm continued to reverberate through each phase of Israel’s unfolding story, shaping the course of history from within—like the form of a tree hidden within its seed.
A new Pharaoh arose who “knew not Joseph” (Exod. 1:8), and the land where the Israelites once found safe harbor became to them an iron furnace of bondage. After 430 years, God raised up Moses to shepherd His people through the wilderness toward the pastures of promise and still waters of Sabbath rest, that they might be consecrated as His holy nation. Moses was called atop Mount Sinai in the desert, where, having emptied himself, he was nourished by divine revelation and received the Law through angels by the hand of a Mediator: God the Word. Part of this revelation was the heavenly pattern for the tabernacle: a liturgical microcosm of the Garden, of the cosmos, of the Heavenly Jerusalem, of the human person as ensouled body, of the Mother of God, of the Church, and of Christ Himself—each mysteriously enfolded within the others as a single participatory space of encounter with the infinite God.
The mountain upon which Moses beheld this tabernacle—Sinai, in its theophanic luminosity—became that eternal paradise of Eden, in which man had once dwelled until he prematurely grasped the fruit of the tree of knowledge—and was exiled. Moses, led by God back into that primordial Garden atop Sinai to receive a new Law—one given to guard His people, during their long return to Paradise, from the disintegrative power of sin which corrodes creation—took this heavenly seed and sowed it within Israel, that they might grow into a tree of righteousness, through whose most holy branch, the Virgin Theotokos, was born the fruit of Jesus Christ. And when this good fruit was taken from that old tree and sown deep into the soil of death, He sprouted forth with power—drawing life out of decay—and from the seed of the dying tree, a new tree arose: the Church, rooted in Him, and now bearing the fruit of eternal life; and those who partake of it become this very tree, yielding the harvest of eternity.
Yet God’s covenantal tree of Israel, for all its blessedness, could not in its youth bear the unmitigated radiance that shone from Moses’s face—veiled for their sake, for their hearts were yet unformed. And so the Lord, in His plenteous mercy, appointed a royal gardener—not to nullify the Law, nor merely to conform the people to its letter, but to awaken their hearts through the fire of spiritual worship, preparing them for the coming enfleshment of God’s Word among them.
In response to the steadfast devotion of those in Israel who longed to see the Lord’s Day, He raised up David, a man after His own heart, to shepherd His people and enthrone the praise of His Name upon Zion. Anointed in obscurity, tempered by suffering, and crowned with the Spirit, David stood at the juncture of kingship and worship—uniting royal authority with the psalmody of repentance. Through him, the ark was brought up in procession, the tabernacle found rest, and the place was prepared for the dwelling of the Lord’s glory among His people. Though David bore within himself the fracture of fallenness, he also carried the covenantal promise in his line; and though his reign gleamed with divine favor, it foreshadowed a deeper fulfillment yet to come. For the kingdom he established would not endure unbroken: the throne would falter, the nation divide, and exile would once again cast his people into sorrow. Yet even amid such desolation, the promise endured—like a smoking flax He would not quench—awaiting the day when the true Son of David would come, not merely to restore the kingdom, but to raise it in glory. In David, the kingdom was typified; in Christ, it would be made flesh. Thus the covenantal song that flowed through David was fulfilled in the voice of his greater Son, who called Himself the True Vine and would gather a people out of all the nations to be branches of His own living Body.
In the Gospel according to St. John, Christ describes Himself and the Church, His collective human Body, as an organically unified fruit-bearing plant: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit” (John 15:5). Through man, Christ works in the Spirit to draw the nations of the earth into His eschatological garden by grafting them all into one Tree, the Church, cultivating them all together in love toward perfection so that they may serve, by His power, as the fount of creation’s living unity. Once all tribes, tongues, and nations have been planted in this new Garden-Paradise, the Cosmic Tree—rooted in Him and photosynthesizing the Spirit—is empowered to fulfill Adam’s original commission as God’s vice-gardener, spreading its roots throughout the whole earth and conveying abroad the living unity it receives from Christ. It reigns in Him with a reign of divine self-offering love, bearing creation into the eternal fullness of being in God.
The Tree of the Church bears human souls as its branches—each, in the image of Christ, both a tree and a gardener. What mystery is this: that each branch, itself a little tree, should also become a gardener? For Christ, the Seed of the woman, was sown into the soil of the earth and rose as the Tree of Life, whose infinite roots fill eternity and whose branches embrace all creation—so that man, grafted into Him, might grow into His likeness: a gardener emerging from a tree. Nourished by its fruit, each partaker of this Tree becomes a transcendent gardener, gathering the fruits of creation and drawing sustenance from them—yet in the very act, transfiguring them, as the energies of creation intertwine with the divine life flowing through the hands of each branch-gardener. Thus does humanity participate in the mystery of Christ’s work of transformation: making all things new by the power of Him who planted the Seed of eternity in the soil of this world.
As St. Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). And if we so behold Him—in that most personal and ineffable communion—we shall enter and participate in His plan to cultivate and raise up the whole of creation, making it our place of rest and bringing it to its consummation as the Garden-Temple-City with foundations: the one for which our father Abraham was looking, and which David enshrined in song, whose builder and maker is God. Through the Prophet Amos, the Lord unveiled a vision of this Kingdom—rebuilt upon the Uncreated Rock and inhabited by His people, the spiritual Israel of Christ:
“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “when the threshing will overtake the harvest, and grapes will ripen at the time the seed is sown, and the mountains will drip sweetness, and all the hills shall share in it. I shall bring back the captives of My people Israel, and they will rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them. They will plant vineyards and drink wine from them. They also will make gardens and eat fruit from them. I shall plant them on their land; no longer will they be uprooted from the land which I have given them,” says the Lord God Almighty (Amos 9:13–15).
With this broad and partial vision of God’s exceedingly wise and merciful plan for creation before us, I pray that we may—through the following chapters—begin to contemplate some of its myriad beautiful threads, always remembering that they are all sewn together by the Spirit into one divine garment of many colors: a kingly raiment with which God is preparing to adorn us.
Perhaps that blessed tree,
the Tree of Life,
is, by its rays,
the sun of Paradise;
its leaves glisten,
and on them are impressed
the spiritual graces
of that Garden.
In the breezes the other trees
bow down as if in worship
before that sovereign
and leader of the trees.2
—St. Ephrem the Syrian
Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Hymns on Paradise. Translated by Sebastian P. Brock. Popular Patristics Series, Number 10. Crestwood, N.Y: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990, p. 91.
Ibid.