The Mother Tree

The “Mother Tree” is Earth-life’s vital source/ resource. From childhood we are taught “mighty oaks from little acorns grow”, and as we grow up we learn also that “little acorns from mighty oaks grow.” Life’s vital source is also the resource of interdependent web-life, the essential fruit of vitality, the “forbidden" fruit.

The “forbidden fruit”, life’s vitality, is also the fruit of consciousness/ conscience, of the knowledge of good and evil. We can’t avoid eating fruit but we can and must avoid wasting the source/ resource of life’s vitality, i.e., stop the wasteful consumption and exploitation (e.g., GMOs) that violate the Mother Tree and put at mortal risk the global ecology.

Every kind of tree produces fruit of its kind, apples, cherries, hickory nuts, plums, etc. What is universal is that “fruit” is the seed that insures the next generation of trees. If seeds are consumed and otherwise wasted there can be no sustainability, no new generation of trees.

What is true of all kinds of life is that the female of the species produces fruit from her deep-down self, which means that the vitality of all life is characterized by the “Mother Tree”, the female of the species. Motherhood is vitality bearing the fruit that sustains interdependent ecology.

The existence and culture of life owe to female providence. When the fruit of the Mother Tree is wasted, life is violated, and life’s “original” vitality is put at risk. The divine mandate “not to consume the fruit of the Mother Tree” is a command to not violate and consume eco-vitality. Motherhood (vitality) originates the webs of flora and fauna and also resources (feeds) individual existence, including human; this states the reasoning for the biological basis behind the theologiy of the “forbidden fruit”, and explains the insight and significance of Walter Brueggemann”s linking the exploitation of women to nature’s exploitation.http://ncronline.org/news/justice/biblical-narrative-economic-policy

Contrary to Aristotelian philosophy and patriarchy’s theological fixation, the male does not produce the seed—the sperm is not a miniature male—the female produces the seed that produces new life. The persona of individual humankind is more defined by the mother’s genetics than by the father’s. Dominion theology and patriarchal fixation have developed together on presumption of the deceived perception that Eve came from the body of Adam.

Women and nature continue to be wasted by the culture of patriarchal dominion, justified in sexual misinformation and hyped male self-arrogation. As Vatican II makes the case, A RADICAL REDIRECTION OF RELIGION AND CULTURE IS NEEDED. Culture and religion need women to lead the way to an authentic sense of interpersonal relationship, biology and theology.

Bad biology is bad theology; good biology is good theology. An addition can rightly be made to John Courtney Murray”s line: “faith supposes reason, as theology supposes biology, as grace supposes nature.” If we are ever to get right with nature we must first get right with biology, with sex, with nature’s symbiotic vitality.

“Original Sin” is the wasting of the Mother Tree, the wasting of Nature’s Vitality.