St. Bonaventure, in the introduction to The Tree of Life, notes the value of imagination: “…imagination aids understanding.”
He constructs a tree of life “in such a way that in the first or lower branches the Savior’s origin and life are described; in the middle, his passion; and in the top, his glorification.”
Bonaventure elaborates on the image inspired by Revelation 22:2: “Picture in your mind a tree whose roots are watered by an ever-flowing fountain that becomes a great and living river with four channels to water the garden of the entire Church.”
In a poem, he writes:
O cross, salvation-bearing tree,
Watered by a living fountain,
Your flower is spice-scented,
Your fruit an object of desire.
The image sparked my imagination: I thought of Peter crucified upside down. The imaginary tree of life, inspired by the life of Jesus and his death on the cross turns our gaze up toward heaven as we survey its branches and its fruit.
In contrast, the image of Peter upside down on a cross evokes a sense of roots anchored in heaven. We look up to find roots that bind Peter to his savior. Peter has not planted his roots in worldly ground, but rather in Christ, his source of strength and nourishment.
In Taming the Wolf I also considered our connection to the transcendent realm, and I created an inverted pyramid to represent spiritual or transcendent needs. These needs, I argued, should be considered in addition to the pyramid of human needs created by Maslow, a pyramid well-known by mediators who assess the needs and interests driving a party.
In such assessments I frequently find the standard paradigm offered by Maslow is lacking. Often parties do not adhere to his model; they violate the hierarchy of human needs. These significant anomalies signal the psychologists’ model is incomplete.
I came to realize that Maslow, grounded in the materialism of psychology, omitted the spiritual and transcendent needs that motivate people to act in ways that make no sense when a model lacks faith-based components. The humility and poverty of St. Francis, for example, defy the logic of Maslow’s model but make perfect sense when we use the inverted pyramid of transcendent needs that reach beyond worldly concerns.
Imagination, it turns out, has practical implications. Bonaventure’s view of the tree of life and the inverted crucifixion of Peter inspire the counter-intuitive idea that our roots reach up rather than down, anchoring us in heaven where the ever-flowing river of water that is Christ provides the nourishment and stability we need to weather threatening storms.
The image matches the idea that our deepest needs are found in the realm of the spiritual or transcendent. As mediators, we must recognize that the choices men of faith make are not unreasoned anomalies but rather only appear to be upside down because they are rooted in another realm. If we are to truly resolve conflict, we must understand those roots and the needs they represent.
Very interesting, and I don’t disagree, from a Christian perspective, Gregg.
Since you’re much more spiritually bilingual than I, I wonder how the tree looks from a Buddhist, nondual perspective.
“This very place is the Lotus Land,
This very body, the Buddha.”
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Translations/Song_of_Zazen.htm
Thanks for the wonderful link.
Now that you bring it up, I imagine the upside down tree can be a very powerful symbol in Buddhism as well.
In Buddhism, one finds a similar idea that all phenomena, all manifestations, are rooted in ultimate mind. (In Christianity the “mind of God”; in Buddhism in the mind of Buddha Nature.)
Buddhism teaches we are adrift in a world of appearances that have no inherent or stand-alone existence. In the world of impermanent and always-changing phenomena, we are lost and we suffer. Our error is attributing inherent existence to those things that are empty of such existence.
Only when we discover our true divine essence do we find our “roots” or our true nature. We find peace and grounding in this ultimate nature.
Bonaventure maps out a path to union with God that is not dissimilar from the Buddhist path, though the language differs. In both there is a gradient series of steps in which one recognizes the true nature of the world and our true nature.
In both, what is most real is the transcendent, the Kingdom of God, or Nibbana.
Bonaventure sees union with God as the “destination” of the journey; in Buddhism, there is a union with the ultimate Buddha Nature. In both cases, roots go “upward,” deep into the ground of the ultimate being.
There are many more similarities that warrant using the same symbol of the upside down tree.
You may enjoy The Gethsemani Encounter, which chronicles a retreat between Buddhist and Christian monastics. The first couple articles, one by Hopkins and one by Mitchell, do a remarkably good job of making comparisons of this nature.