"It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree" - a sermon for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity.

On Thursday morning many of us woke to news that the landscape of our region had changed irrevocably.

After the storms of the night before it was discovered that the Sycamore tree, which had stood as a solitary sentry in a clear gap on Hadrian’s Wall had fallen. Initially it was thought that the wild winds of the north had finally claimed the tree, but quickly a more sinister truth emerged. 

The tree had fallen not by natural means or by an act of God, but by human hands. Almost unbelievably someone had felled the tree. This was not an act or wild and frenzied destruction, but one achieved with cold and calculated efficiency. In the dead of night someone had taken professional equipment, marked the cutting line in white paint, and then felled it with a professional skill which would, in other circumstances, bring the admiration of the most experienced workers of the nearby forests of Wark and Kielder.

As many of you will have seen, and some of us will have felt, this act has brought about an unexpected level of grief and anger. Perhaps exacerbated by the calculated nature of this action, it has asked many to reflect on what that tree meant to them. It is a reality which means something to me as well as I was, for six-and-a-half years, that tree’s Vicar. I know the family that farms that land, the people who work in the nearby visitors’ centres and pubs, and have talked often both there, and here in Carlisle, to walkers looking forward as they made their own pilgrimage to the Sycamore Gap.

The word “iconic” is overused in our culture, but the Sycamore Gap is, or was, iconic. When I moved to be Vicar of Haydon Bridge and Beltingham with Henshaw - what we later called the "Parishes by the Wall" -  I shared a photo of the Sycamore Gap. Well more accurately I shared a picture of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood standing at the Sycamore Gap to announce my appointment to friends. The prominence of the Sycamore Gap in our popular imagination came for many from that film, its improbable placement between Dover and Sherwood Forest giving it a notoriety and fame in our popular imagination.

The Sycamore Gap is also ubiquitous. When we were thinking of a logo for the Parishes by the Wall we considered using the Sycamore Gap. We then discounted the idea as it would not differentiate us from the local schools, accountants, plumbers, holiday lets, and very excellent beer who all used the image as their logo.

However, there was more to the Sycamore Gap than simply begin in a scene from a famous film or a ubiquitous image. It was intrinsically aesthetically beautiful. The tree, which was evenly and symmetrically shaped, standing in the middle of an equally symmetrical gap in the Whin Sill; it was “picture perfect”.

But none of this, in itself, explains the strength of reaction that felling of this tree has caused over the last few days. As I have been reflecting on this, I have found myself reflecting on why so many people were drawn to visit and walk to the something which, some might say, was “just a tree”.

Trees, of course, play a defining and recurring role in our shared cultural and spiritual life. All cultures have myths and legends built around the simple elegance of trees. Whether that is Ash trees as the Tree of Life of Norse mythology; or the evergreen trees of North America which defined the creation myths of their own culture; or closer to home, the role the oak tree has played in the spiritual pre-history of these islands where the druids were literally “oak men”.

As we reflect on the power of trees in our popular consciousness it is impossible to find one simple root or basis for this identity. Reflecting on the tree of the Sycamore Gap I found myself recalling the theories of anthropologists of religion, who have pointed out how trees act as a break between the horizontal realm of our earthly experience and the vertical realm of the heavenly and the divine.  Like a standing stone, and later great church buildings, they draw our eyes to heaven. Trees, often solitary trees, standing in the landscape create and intuitive link between our rootedness on earth and the heavens that their bows and branches draw our eyes too.

It would be possible to discount and dismiss all of this as mere folk-religion, except for the way in which Christian iconography and writing has drawn on this image. One of the finest examples of this is in one of the great poems of Anglo-Saxon England, The Dream of the Rood.

It begins with a vision of the Rood, or rod - the old English name for the cross - as a glorious and bejewelled tree:

It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree

raised on high, wound round with light,

the brightest of beams.

As the elegy to this tree continues the voice of the narrator changes to that of the tree itself.  Through the voice of the tree we hear it tell of waiting to be felled. Thinking this would be an ignominious fate, the Rood learns that, instead, it will carry not a criminal, but the Son of God. The tree then becomes our Lord’s retainer, feeling and carrying the wounds and pain of his crucifixion which became a sign and badge of honour for that unsuspecting tree:

Lo! the King of glory, Guardian of heaven’s kingdom

honored me over all the trees of the forest,

As the voice then turns back to the original narrator we hear of this link between the horizontal and vertical, of the eloquence of the tree to point us beyond ourselves to heaven. So, we are told of the ongoing power and dignity of the Rood to link us between the human violence of the cross and the heavenly hope and victory it points us to:

He who here on earth once suffered

on the hanging-tree for human sin;

He ransomed us and gave us life,

a heavenly home. Hope was renewed

with cheer and bliss for those who were burning there.

We are often told that we live in a less religious world. I think that the outpouring and emotion I have seen over the felling of a free over the last few days would seem to counter that narrative. It is true that we live in a less religiously literate world. The language of faith and hope, of judgement and redemption and the stories than accompany them are less present than they were even a generation ago. What remains though is an often inarticulate longing for the numinous, for the other which simple signs in our landscape, like the simple eloquence of a tree in a dip in the horizon, speak of. It is for this reason, more than its faded fame in Hollywood movies that the tree at the Sycamore Gap meant so much to people.

It was a place where couples, whose weddings I took, got engaged. Where the ashes of dearly loved relatives whose funerals I conducted were scattered. It was a place which weary pilgrim and walkers, taking on the most challenging section of the Hadrian’s Wall path, would seek and long to get to. It was a place, to quote the words of that great prayer of St Augustine which we heard echoed in our Collect today, that so many found rest for their restless hearts.

In our gospel today Jesus invites us all, through a parable, to seek rest for our restless hearts. In this parable it is not by a tree, but in a similarly powerful metaphor, in a vineyard. Here, Jesus says, is a place to which all are called and all are welcome. A place which makes saints of sinners if they only have the courage to truly seek and know God in that place.

And that, after all, is the longing for which we all seek. A place where we can be truly ourselves. A place where we are truly loved and known. That place might be a tree on a distant frontier, or a Cathedral on that same wall. 

Wherever it might be, we need to know that, in God’s love, we are welcome to find and seek that rest. And that nothing, not even the might or cruelty or selfishness of man, can separate us from that truth.