Some years ago a student wrote to me after a hard winter. Her marriage had ended, she had been ill, and the work she had given twenty years to had been taken from her in a single afternoon. She had kept the Morning Watch through all of it, she said, more or less, but she had begun to wonder whether the practice was meant for people like her now. Everything on the site, she wrote, seems to assume a life that is standing up. Mine has been cut down. Is there a way for a stump?
I wrote back to her about Isaiah. This article is a longer version of that letter, for her and for anyone else who has asked the same question in the dark.
The Stump of Jesse
In the eleventh chapter of Isaiah: there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. The house of David was a great tree once. The prophet saw it felled. He did not see it replanted, or rescued, or grafted. He saw a green shoot coming up out of what was left at ground level, from roots no one had thought to look at.
The image is not a single verse. Earlier, at his calling, Isaiah is told that the land will be laid waste and the people taken away, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled, and then the line ends: the holy seed is its stump. Whatever is holy in Israel, the prophet says, will survive in the part that looks dead.
Tobias, who keeps the texts and keeps me honest, reminds me that Isaiah uses two words in that verse, a shoot and a branch, and that the second, netzer, is the one with the consonants of Nazareth. He also reminds me that the other famous Branch of the prophets, the righteous Branch that Jeremiah and Zechariah promise to David, is a different Hebrew word altogether, and that the scrolls use that other word when they speak of the Branch of David who will arise at the end of days. The prophets had many words for the green thing that grows from a ruin. They needed many.
The Planting in the Hymns
The desert community thought of itself as a planting. The Community Rule calls it an eternal planting, a house of holiness for Israel. And two of the Thanksgiving Hymns, which the fellowship reads every spring, describe a garden set by hidden springs in a dry land: trees of life beside a secret fountain, and among them a shoot that will become an eternal planting, whose roots go down to the deep and whose branches will shade the whole earth, guarded by flame so that no stranger may drink from its spring. Tobias tells me that the word for shoot in those hymns is, at least once, Isaiah's own word.
The speaker of the second hymn sees himself as the one who tends the garden, a fountain of streams in a dry land, and confesses that when he withdraws his hand the planting withers. The community knew it was small and the desert was large. They did not think of themselves as a great tree. They thought of themselves as a shoot, kept alive by hidden water, waiting to grow.
A People Named for a Branch
And then, within a century or two, a movement appeared whose very names came from this verse. Its teacher was called the Nazarene, and the evangelist heard in that name the branch of Isaiah. The bishop of Salamis says that before his followers were called Christians they were for a time called Jessaeans, from Jesse, the father of David, the stump the shoot came from. The first followers of the Way were named, by themselves or by others, after a green thing growing out of a felled tree.
It suited them. They began after a crucifixion, which is as complete a felling as there is. They were scattered by a war that left their city in ashes. The Nazarenes who kept their name east of the Jordan were cut back again and again, by the synagogue and the church and the centuries, and they kept putting out green until there was no root left to put it out from. The name was not a decoration. It was a description of how they lived.
For the Student Whose Life Has Been Cut Down
Here is what I wrote to my correspondent, more or less.
The way was never only for lives that are standing up. Read the texts again: the Essenes went to the lowest place on earth, the hymn's garden grows in a dry land, the branch comes from a stump. Every one of the images the tradition chose for new life is an image of life coming up out of loss. You are not outside the practice because your life has been cut down. You are in the place the practice was made for.
Shoots do not come from the crown of a tree. They come from the base, from the roots, from the part that was hidden while the tree stood tall and that no one admired. When a life is felled, what is left is what was always underneath it: the habits kept without applause, the hours kept in the dark, the small faithfulness. That is where the green comes from. It is why the Lection says to keep the hour when you cannot pray. The kept hour is a root.
And it will be slow. The Lection also says, be patient with the slow growth of the soul; a cedar is not a weed. A shoot from a stump looks absurd for a long time: a few leaves at the foot of something that used to be magnificent. Do not compare it with what stood there before. Compare it with nothing at all, which is what you feared, and which is not what you have.
In the gospel of John, Jesus says that he is the vine and we are the branches, and that every branch that bears fruit the vinedresser prunes, so that it may bear more. Pruning is a cut. It looks, to the branch, exactly like loss. I do not say that every loss is a pruning; some are only loss, and should be mourned as loss. But some are not, and the practice is how we find out which.
A Practice: The Cutting
I sent my correspondent a practice with the letter, and I offer it here to anyone who wants it.
- Take a cutting. A willow is best, because willows will root from almost any piece of themselves, as if they cannot help living. If there is no willow near, mint or basil or any plant a neighbor tells you roots easily in water will do.
- Set it at your place. Put the cutting in a glass of water beside the lamp where you keep the Morning Watch.
- Look at it. Each morning, before the silence, look at it for the space of three breaths. Do not pray over it. Just look. When the water clouds, change it, so that it is fresh, as near to living water as a glass can be.
- Wait. In two or three weeks, usually, small white roots will appear from a stick that had none. You did not make them. You only kept the water clean and looked.
- Give it away. When it has rooted well, plant it, or give it to someone else whose life has been cut down. Tell them nothing, or tell them about Isaiah. Either will do.
At the Evening Watch, during those weeks, add one question to the gratitude: what grew today from something that had been cut down? Most evenings the answer will be very small. Write it down anyway. After forty days, read the list.
My correspondent wrote to me again the following spring. She had planted the willow by a ditch at the edge of a field near her new apartment. It was taller than she was, she said, and she still did not know what her life was going to be. But she had stopped asking whether there was a way for a stump. She had seen one.