Psalm 29:5
The voice of the Lord
breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
Ahh trees. I love trees and thickets and windbreaks and woods
and bottle-necks of woods.
Tall glorious growths that breathe our air backwards in
benevolence and exhale that we might fill our lungs. Quietly sociable rustling
creatures in the breeze, waving creaking monsters during storms, and pleasant,
shady statues during the summer days.
Trust in a tree’s strength is true-placed. As a child, I
never doubted a tree. Surely the branches that barked my shins and scratched my
palms with their rough, delicate skin could withstand the light stand of a
girl. Surely limbs that waved themselves only slightly in the wildest of winter
winds could bear the weight of a wanderer.
Yet cedars. Cedars have thick boles and branches that shade
each other and reach out under each other like people spreading their hands
palm-up to reach the sun. The cedars slant and thicken around their middles and
squat to stretch further.
I think of the boles of the redwoods, for the branches I scarcely
saw. I recall thick trunks with knobby supports that dived underground to
become roots. I remember backing up and staring in fascination at the lens of
my camera because I could not see the edge of the tree in it. I remember
looking up at the smooth, ancient grooves in their reddish bark and watching
them stretch like lightning bolts up the sides of the trees to where the lower
branches were – high above the rest of the forest. The tops of these trees? I
never saw them.
The voice of the Lord
breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
Cedars – redwoods – indisputable signs of strength, and yet
the strength of a shout from heaven snaps them over.
These trees are majestic like natural pillars to the
entrance of a king’s remote palace, perhaps the palace of heaven. But when the
king cries Welcome! even the
supporting pillars wilt.
These trees grow in beauty and glory season by season, and
extend themselves in their assigned shapes with graceful stretch and silhouette.
Yet when their maker’s beauty beacons from afar, even their full glory is
disfigured next to this radiant embodiment of beauty unborn.
Yet some in this torrential rain of glory hear only terror.
In pain and anguish they decipher not soft syllables but slavery. The powerful
voice is the voice they have come to fear and revile, for the only powerful
voice they know is a voice that beats them the while.
And over these, I pray the Psalm 29:9, for The Lord makes the deer give birth.
He is over the long-lived glory of the cedars, and the
miraculous coming forth of the fawns. Just as his voice causes cedars to
crumble, so his gentleness cradles new life. His glory triumphs over that of
the earth, so his tenderness tends the weak.
And so our God is a God of glory and thunder and babies, a
God of declaring beauty and a God of delicate birth.
A God of the strength of cedars, and a God of the fragility
of fawns.
