Walking Tree
The group I am co-leading on an Emmaus Encounter to Hawai‘i enters its last full day today. In this special edition of the ‘blog series, “Inspirit, that Love Might Grow,” I am slapping some paint not onto the canvas, but onto the palette. So much has happened, ranging from amazing experiences to even more amazing conversations, that I don’t suspect I’ll be writing anything summative anytime soon. But perhaps the paint I lay down will provide both readers and me with something to work with as we imagine new ways of being together.
Emmaus Encounters: Building Community on the Road is a new and emerging form of travel seminar built by a coalition of leaders — students, staff, faculty, partners — at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School between 2020–2023. The trip taking place now is its maiden voyage. The model’s innovation lays in the fact the seminar departs from current and recent-past travel seminar models in its hoped-for outcomes and design. I refer to it as “emerging” because it is still very much under construction as an andragogical response to a burgeoning educational need. That educational need is the necessity to teach current and future leaders how to build community.
Building community in and among groups is a core function for religious leaders like the ones our school educates. It’s also a societal function for which the world looks to religious leaders. Ministers have convening power, even in an increasingly nonreligious culture. They can bring together conversations no one else can, and from those conversations, new ways to live emerge.
Emmaus Encounters: Building Community on the Road takes its name from the resurrection story in Luke’s Gospel. In that account, the risen Christ appears to Jesus’ followers by striking up a conversation with them while walking on the road. He is then made known to them in the breaking of bread. On this journey to Hawai‘i, we go places, we do things, we talk about things, we break break, and something happens that changes us.
Andover Newton at YDS chose Hawai‘i as its first destination for an Emmaus Encounter because of Andover, Newton, Yale, and the Congregational Church’s 200-year shared history. Although Andover Newton has only been part of YDS since 2017, people from our respective institutions traveled to Hawai‘i as missionaries in the early 18th Century. They established churches and schools that remain active today, although they have of course evolved and changed. The history is as rich and meaningful as it is complicated and painful. What better setting to enter for the sake of building relationships that might show us the way into a future that differs from a fraught past? What better place for future ministers to learn about how to help a community grapple with its identity?
With all of this background in mind, here is a summary of what’s happened on our trip thus far. Over the next few ‘blogs, I’ll return to various themes for more reflective sharing. As of now, reflection has only begun. My instructional colleague and I are, after all, guiding 12 other adults through unfamiliar territory with an ambitious schedule and high hopes that we’ll use every minute to the good.
Rather than give our group time to ease into travel, our first stop involved literally getting our hands dirty. Hawai‘ian fishermen have cultivated fishponds, or indigenous fish farms, for a thousand years. These ponds wall in foot-ball-field-sized portions of seacoast where freshwater enters from a mountain stream. The brackish water, resulting from the estuary ecosystem, allows plants small fish like to eat to flourish. The pond’s wall includes intermittent gates, through which small fish can swim in, but their predators cannot. The little fish get nice and big inside the pond and then are too pudgy to leave through the gates. When the day’s catch is meager, for whatever reason, the fishpond becomes their refrigerator from which the community can pull dinner.
Our group learned and worked at Pae Pae ‘O Heia, a fishpond where young Hawai‘ian environmentalists are restoring a fishpond that was, until recently, filled with silt runoff from the mountains and socked in with the roots of mangrove trees. Our group moved heavy rocks together that will help continue to build the wall around the pond. We weeded invasive species to protect indigenous, and in some cases sacred, plants. We created a bucket brigade to remove a small island of mangrove branches from a pile in the water to a pile on the shore. We got utterly filthy. We laughed harder than I have in a long time. A great start.
Saturday was meaningful, but also emotionally harder. We spent the morning at Pearl Harbor’s National Park, learning about the difficult-to-imagine events of December 7, 1941. We visited the wreckage of the USS Arizona, which is not just a monument, and not just a ruin, but a graveyard, in that most sailors who died in its hull remain there. We learned how survivors of the bombing of the USS Arizona asked that their remains be interred there, leading to the creation of funeral practices that demonstrate to me the necessity of theologically grounded, but also creatively imaginative, spiritual leaders.
We visited a battleship and spent time with its chaplains. The contrasts were almost too much to fathom. Consider these discontinuities:
- A war machine, which could level a city, with a beautiful view.
- Young men, in their late teens and early 20s, giving years to service in crowded and uninviting spaces.
- Chaplains who couldn’t imagine a better place to be in ministry, given the work of military chaplaincy’s intensity and meaningful connections.
- Hospitality and access that we wouldn’t have dared request, showered upon us by an Andover Newton alumnus who wanted to say thank you for the experience he had in our seminary many years ago.
We co-led worship with partners at Kawaiaha‘o Church, sharing in music, preaching, and the reading of scripture. We joined with that church’s staff over food and formed new friendships. We then visited two schools, one after the other, which were similar to and different from each other in ways we’ve only begun to unpack. Both of them have direct ties to Andover, Newton, and Yale in their origin stories. Both struggle with the same questions we do about what in the world to do with the mixed history of Congregational missionaries, whose impact on Hawai‘i’s trajectory throughout the Modern Era and into this day cannot be overstated.
The image that stays with me as I begin to ponder what these experiences mean to me, to our school, and to our churches is that of a young mangrove root. Hawai‘ians refer to mangroves as “walking trees.” They are not indigenous to Hawai‘i but were imported with the best of intentions. Sugarcane farming stripped the topsoil of Hawai‘ian fields. Fields on an incline, coming down the mountains, suffered runoff from rains, so the same merchants who imported sugar imported mangrove trees as well to slow erosion.
The problem was that the mangrove trees just loved it here. They grew slowly but aggressively. How? Because their young roots reach out beyond the root base and grab onto soil farther away, ultimately causing the tree to move, over time, onto different ground. When our group moved a nest of branches from water to land, I saw several of these young roots, and they looked downright alien. Whereas mature roots were your typical, craggy versions of their above-ground sibling branches, the young roots were a different color, shape, and texture. At their ends were small, grassy root balls that resembled a mossy satellite that would ultimately expand the root bed and make the trees almost impossible to pull up.
Our schools’ young graduates who became missionaries in and around 1819 were like these young roots. They shot away from the based of the New England Congregationalists and established a grassroots foothold on Hawai‘i. Over time, the roots deepened, and they transplanted the church. The church became like any other invasive species: helpful in some contexts — like where mangrove trees succeed in preventing erosion — but they were also, perhaps mostly, a source of disruption, damage, and a need for uprooting. What are we to do with this history, this reality, now?
My lunch companion after church Sunday was a staff member with a theology different from my own. He spoke in mystical terms unfamiliar to hyper-rational-New-Englander yours truly. He said, over plates of food and coffee cups, that God put it on his heart to tell me something about planting a tree. I asked if God had elaborated in any way; he said no. But I also told him that the image of a tree planted by the stream of water is an image I’ve always found powerful.
Perhaps God told me, through my lunch companion, “Be careful what you plant, as you don’t want your school’s students of a hundred years from now to have to get all dirty pulling it up and throwing it away.”
