It started out, like all oak trees, as a simple acorn. Not all acorns become mighty trees, but this one did. It was celebrated – the acorn – in 1997 as symbolic of the birth of Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology. The year before, McAfee opened its doors to the first class of students. Twenty-five years later, we are still opening our doors to students preparing for their calling to ministry.

Like the school, the “McAfee Oak” has flourished in many directions, providing shade for Mercer students hanging out, and home to squirrels, chipmunks, blue birds, and humming birds. My office window frames the tree nicely, and in the late afternoon the McAfee Oak filters the sun from overwhelming my desk. It even has it own webpage.

A quarter of a century is not a long time, at least by oak timetables, so it was surprising and upsetting when on a sunny, quiet August morning the McAfee Oak split in two. In spite of a full canopy of green leaves, we all assumed the culprit was some hidden disease, coursing its destruction down to its roots. The arborist, however, said disease was not the cause. It was overall healthy. The problem was that the tree grew multiple trunks going in several directions, and over time it created a hollow place in the center. Through the passage of seasons this hollow place filled with water, and water, without a place to drain or absorb, leads to rot.

Around the office several of us have weighed in with our own interpretive moralisms, metaphors, and similes regarding the demise of the McAfee Oak. Remember, we are all a bunch of preachers! But maybe, like Qoheleth of Ecclesiastes, the season just simply passed for the oak, like a vapor, like a wind. Not one of us – trees and all the rest – are permanent residents.

Of course, it is the hollow place of the McAfee Oak that gives me pause. I think about my own hollow places. Wounds, bitterness, and resentments, have a way of festering, a way of hollowing away in me. Hollow places usually don’t stay hollow. They fill up with debris and clutter and rot. The end is ruin. A colleague of mine often quips, “Grief not transformed is transferred.” The hollow place, unattended, becomes the source of demise. With a quiet “whump” the tree fell, exposing the hollow place and the rot that quietly smothered out life.

Maybe there is no lesson here. Maybe a dead tree is just a dead tree. Perhaps, however, we can at least reflect on the importance of attending to our hollow places, including our institutions like school, like church, like family, like society. We branch out – sorry about the pun – in every direction, not attending to the impact or the consequences on others, failing to understand that precisely what we need in order to flourish, is also what others need too.

“Let us not grow weary,” Paul wrote to the churches of Galatia, “of doing good, for in due season we will reap…” (6:9 NRSV) Attending to the hollow places, let us do some good. I will spare naming out all the “isms” that rot away in all the hollow places in our world and in our souls. It is enough for today, on this gentle day, to do some good on this earth, behind our pulpits, but especially beyond the stained glass. Maybe it is as simple as that – do good for yourself and for one another, and by doing good you take care of those gaping spaces that bring rot and destruction.

In time, like the owl looking to nest, the hollow place can also ripen with life.

Gratefully.

Greg