There’s been a lot of talk about fire lately.  First, today is the feast of Pentecost, the day when, in the tradition of the church, the period of transition between the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ and the moment when the Holy Spirit descended as the flame of ministry and carried the apostles into the world to tell what we Christians call the Good News, or the Gospel (Acts 2:1-21).

And then there were the great words from Presiding Bishop Curry’s wedding sermon heard round the world, quoting the work of Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin when he said:  “Fire makes that possible, and de Chardin said fire was one of the great discoveries in all of human history. He went on to say if humanity ever harnesses the energy of fire again, if humanity ever captured the energies of love, it will be the second time in the history that will have discovered fire.” (Transcript from the Washington Post, May 19, 2018).

So much talk of fire, and its power to create anew rather than its power to destroy.  So it only seemed fitting that the talk of fire would continue, even here, in Sequoia National Park where I am on vacation.  I did not spend my morning wearing reading and hearing again the story of Pentecost.  Instead, I spent my morning in a forest of giant sequoia trees, learning from a park ranger a most stunning fact about those trees — they cannot thrive and reproduce without fire.

That’s right.  Without fire, the brush and debris that surrounds the forest floor around them would not be cleared, and there would be no place for their seeds to find a home and grow.  More than that — without fire, the tender cones that hold their seeds would not grow brown and fall to the ground to begin the resurrection process.  Without fire to trim the leaves of the forest canopy and create places for the shafts of sunlight to peep through, these sun loving creations of God would not have the light they need to sprout and grow. Without fire, there would be no new sequoias here, in this fragile place, the only place on earth where these trees grow and create new trees.

As humans, we are mostly afraid of fire, I think.  Oh yes, we like it when it is controlled in a fireplace or a backyard fire pit, or when we can have the illusion that we have harnessed it for our own purposes, like cooking or any of the other myriad of uses that Bishop Curry mentioned in his amazing sermon.  But who among us could give ourselves over to it, without fear, and accept its cleansing and restorative power, as does the mighty sequoia tree?

So let the talk about fire continue.  And personally, I’m going to see what I can learn from these grand trees I find myself among right now.  For, in the words of John Muir, the naturalist who spent his life communicating to the world about the beauty of these woods, “By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, nature accomplishes her beneficent designs — now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, and again, in the fullness of time, an organic outburst of life (1877).”

Fire, you see, can create.  And I wonder, what might fire create in this world, if we just let it?