When I was a child, I told my mother it was a mistake: “I’m supposed to be a tree.” Her progeny had gone haphazard, some wires nestled within the universe had crossed at no fault of her own. Now, I inhabited this small body that had been forcefully squeezed out and thrust into an unpredictable landscape. I had to talk, to learn manners, to engage with others in ways I didn’t fully comprehend — all so uncomfortable. My body felt strange most of the time, if not always, scared, unaware of what to expect in such an unexpected place. I imagined myself, my soul, meant to be tucked within a tree. Cocooned inside its sturdy trunk, the relief I would feel as I could stretch my energy through its branches and curl up inside its twisting knots, through the thin twigs and coursing through the veins of every leaf, to each and every pointed tip. These crinkled strands of anxious thought smoothing as they reached upward and outward. No more criss-crossing throughways of this brain, just breathing and swaying with the wind, the only change occurring naturally during seasons and over decades of aging, grounded in place. It was all too much. I simply wanted to exist in unison with the nature I felt understood me.

A life of devotion may have suited me, perhaps, had my path diverged from the early tragedies that wrenched me from youth and away from a belief in God. Nunnery, daily ritual and singular purpose, is somewhat close to being a tree, I imagine. Existing to serve an Almighty purpose. If God created Earth, Earth must be an extension of Himself, no? God lives within all things of creation, surely. They have been touched by Him and so retain Him. It stands to reason: to serve God must be to serve His creation.

But I am not Paul Schrader’s character of Reverend Toller (played ever artfully by Ethan Hawke). My losses did not guide me toward God, an unreachable force that watches over us in all-knowing, all-seeing divinity. Tangible occurrences, immediacy of the here and now was far too palpable to focus on something I could not sense. I became obsessive in early adolescence, full of terrified hope: “I must do something,” I not only thought but was certain. Sitting at the computer, I signed petitions for hours after school. I put on small protests of no more than five people, all that can be organized at nine years old. I became a vegetarian after learning that animal agriculture accounts for almost 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. My mind was consumed by overwhelming anxiety. “Can God forgive us? For what we’ve done to this world?” asks Michael (Philip Ettinger), a young man steered toward the religious council by his newly-pregnant wife, Mary (Amanda Seyfried). Reverend Toller sits across from him, hospitable cup of tea in hand, listening. Michael, a near-militant climate activist, has rattled off statistics: one third of the natural world has been destroyed in our lifetime; by 2050 the earth’s atmosphere will be three degrees centigrade higher (four is the threshold); low-lying areas underwater across the world; Central Africa will suffer a fifty percent reduction in crops due to drought. The clarity with which the film presents this is so grave and exigent as to be utterly horrific, crippling any thought of a fruitful future. How on earth could one even consider bringing a child into this quickly approaching state of being? How could we live with ourselves? “Can God forgive us? For what we’ve done to this world?” “I don’t know. Who can know the mind of God?”

Yet, so few choose to grapple with this advancing doom. We are human and we will maintain, surely. But in thinking we are an outlier, God’s most special creation, we doom ourselves. Nature continues and we, too, continue to disfigure and ravage it — a never-ending war. And war is the creation of Man, not nature after all, and certainly not God. Light gleaming off dead slabs of wood that breathed the air of hundreds of years ago and now lie in steeple structure, a pristine white holy graveyard. Their dismembered form bearing witness to a wrestling severity, an increasing urgency so tremendous that one is unable to hold anything else at the forefront of being. Toller goes down the rabbit hole, learning of impact as close to him as his own breath. Inhaling and exhaling these distressing factors of impending doom over and over. If we are truly made in His image, how can we, as an entirety, cause our own destruction and, in adjacent narrative, His destruction as well? But something went wrong somewhere along the line that is time linear. Eve bit into the apple, a betrayal of purity that God and, subsequently, Man possessed. And women bring life. So all lives were tainted in turn. And the multiplication of ruination began. With every human life created, there is an addition to the world of either godliness (His image is somehow preserved), or blight (we have fallen, inherent sin is sustained).

“I know that nothing can change and I know there is no hope. Thomas Merton wrote this,” the Reverend scrolls in his newly kept journal, a documentation of realization. Merton, a Catholic monk, scholar, and social activist, also kept a journal. As does our protagonist Toller’s fellow afflicted, cinematic parallel priest in Robert Bresson’s 1951 French masterpiece Diary of a Country Priest. The titular priest’s dying words: “What does it matter? All is Grace.” In acceptance of abomination, these figures find freedom. In this freedom, Reverend Toller sees reflection in those also seeking, able to recognize intimacy in the face of extinction. Love is welcomed at the threshold of inescapable annihilation. And all will end in the embrace of our comcimatant Apollyon.

“A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It “consents,” so to speak, to God's creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.” - Thomas Merton (New Seeds of Contemplation, 1949)

Accepting Abomination: On FIRST REFORMED