The shape of a tree

There is a question that consumes decades of certain lives: can't he, or won't he? It gets asked about fathers, mothers, brothers, old friends: anyone whose behaviour follows a pattern so destructive and so obvious that the people around them cannot believe it survives contact with its own consequences. Surely he sees it. Surely, if he sees it, he could stop. And if he could stop and doesn't, that's a choice; so we argue, explain, present evidence, stage the intervention, and wait for the crisis that will finally make it undeniable.

The question feels urgent because everything seems to hang on the answer. If he can't, patience is owed. If he won't, the account is different. But the question is malformed, and seeing why dissolves a great deal of futile effort.

Consider how a tree grows.

Rings

Each year a tree lays down a ring of new wood around the wood that already exists. The new ring does not get a vote on the shape beneath it. It takes the existing form as its substrate (the lean, the twist, the bend around some obstacle long since removed) and it builds on that form, thickening it, committing to it, incorporating it into the structure that must bear the next year's load. A tree bent around a boulder in its tenth year does not hold the bend as an ongoing decision. The bend is now what the wood is. Everything grown since assumes it.

And here is the detail most people don't know: the inner wood of a mature tree is dead. Heartwood is dead tissue in the strict biological sense: no living cells, no metabolism, no capacity for response. The living tree is only a thin layer of cambium at the outer edge, a few cells deep, laying down this year's ring on top of everything that came before. The great mass of the trunk, the part that determines the shape and holds the whole thing up, is beyond revision. Not resistant to revision. Beyond it, the way the past is beyond it.

A can't assembled out of won'ts

A human character is built the same way, ring by ring.

Every response to difficulty lays down wood. Take a man who meets a bad mood by finding an external cause: a person to blame, a grievance to voice, whatever happens to be nearest that can be conscripted as the reason he feels the way he feels. In doing so he has made a small choice. It is a real choice, freely made, and trivially deniable: one incident, one bad day, one unfair accusation that costs him nothing and spares him the alternative. But the next bad mood arrives on top of that ring, and the routing is now slightly easier in one direction than the other. Choose it again and it is easier still. The refusals accumulate the way rings accumulate: each one a decision at the time, each one structural afterward.

Run this for a few decades and the question can't or won't answers itself, though not in either of the expected ways. The won't happened: thousands of times, distributed across a lifetime, each instance too small to prosecute. What exists now is the result, a can't assembled entirely out of won'ts. The responsibility is real but amortised, spread so thin across so many years that it is invisible at any single moment you might try to point to it. And the capacity that was never exercised was never built. The circuitry that would route a bad feeling toward its actual cause, the circuitry that says this misery follows from what I did, is not lying suppressed in such a man, waiting for the right argument to switch it on. It was never constructed, because every year the construction was declined, and the wood grew around the refusal.

Why argument fails

This is why arguing fails, and why it fails in a particular way that the people doing the arguing rarely diagnose. The explanation, the evidence, the carefully worded letter: these are transmissions, and they fail not because they are badly composed but because they are addressed to a receiver that does not exist. The signal is fine. There is no equipment on the other end. A lifetime of effort went into making sure there never would be, because the receiver, once installed, would deliver only one message, and that message was intolerable: the thing you call your life is the source of your misery.

Meanwhile (and this is the darker symmetry) the machinery running in the other direction is magnificent. The instant location of an external cause. The fluent grievance, produced under emotional load without hesitation or effort. Fluency like that is never innate; it is the signature of investment. Nobody performs a skill instantly, under pressure, without decades of rehearsal. Such a man is not undeveloped. He is specialised, and specialisation, in the biological sense, is purchased with plasticity. The organism exquisitely fitted to one niche has traded away the capacity to live anywhere else. He is perfectly adapted to an environment in which someone else absorbs the blame: a spouse, a child, a colleague, whoever stands nearest when the bad feeling needs a cause. Remove that environment and you do not get reform. You get a specialist in a habitat that no longer exists.

Why crisis fails too

The tree explains one more thing, and it is the thing people find hardest to accept: why crisis doesn't work either. The frightening diagnosis, the fall down the stairs that the drink finally causes, the brush with death — surely that gets through. But storms do not reshape mature trees. Storms break them, or they don't. The only force that ever shaped the tree was continuous, applied across the growing years, when the wood was being laid down and could still take a direction. That window closes. What remains late in life is not a person who won't bend but wood that can't, and mortal threat, arriving as input, goes into the only processor that exists and comes out externally attributed like everything else: the doctors are alarmist, the fall was the staircase's fault and not the bottle's, the test was wrong. Death is not a louder message that finally penetrates. It is more material for the same machinery, and the machinery has one output.

Where to stand

All of this sounds bleak. For the people standing near such a tree, it is closer to the opposite, because they have usually spent years carrying a private weight: the belief that he could have been reached, and that every failure to reach him was therefore their failure. As long as it seemed that the right words or the right crisis might do it, every failed attempt could be read as personal insufficiency: wrong approach, wrong timing, not enough love. The release hidden in the shape of the tree is that this ledger was fiction. When reality's strongest argument bounces off, every weaker argument is retroactively acquitted. The variable was never on the transmitting side. There was no chance, and that fact carries no information about the one who tried.

What is left, practically, is an older and humbler discipline: you do not argue with the shape of a tree. You decide where to stand relative to it. That is not coldness, and it is not abandonment; it is the recognition that persuasion was never one of the options, and that placement is. Some trees can be lived beside at any distance. Others are hollowing from the inside while the bark looks whole, and stand close enough to the house that when a branch comes down (and with a tree like that it is when, not if) it lands on whoever loyalty has kept underneath. Standing in the fall line does not heal the wood. Choosing your distance is the one decision that was always yours, and I have written elsewhere about how to make it without turning it into a verdict.

Discernment is not the verdict

It should be said plainly that none of this is a verdict on a soul. Reading the grain of the wood (the visible shape, the fruit or its absence) is discernment, and discernment is required of anyone who has to live near the tree. But read the grain without playing judge yourself: the final judgment is not ours to give.

The Greek of the New Testament even keeps the two acts in separate words, and the separation is worth having. The verb behind judge not, that ye be not judged is krino (κρίνω): to pronounce the final verdict on a person, to sentence them, to settle the account. Discernment belongs to a different family: diakrisis (διάκρισις), the discrimination of things, the reading of fruit and trajectory. Scripture forbids the first and commands the second, in the same sermon and almost in the same breath: you could not obey beware of false prophets without assessing exactly which trees bear bad fruit. What is forbidden is playing judge, because the account is one only God can close.

The distinction matters here for a hard, practical reason: the man himself will not be able to feel it. Deciding where to stand is diakrisis-work, a reading of conduct and a response to conduct. But it will land in him as krino, a total sentencing of his self, because receiving a partial judgment takes equipment too, and that equipment was never built. A receiver that could take in this behaviour, not you was declined along with all the rest. So the boundary will be reported, loudly, as condemnation. It isn't. His experience of the thing does not convert it into what he experiences it as. The category lives on your side of the transmission, not his.

The shape as it is

There is a corollary, and it cuts closer to home than the arguing did: see the tree as the shape it is, not as the shape you are waiting for it to become. Nearly everyone who lives close to a person like this carries a second, imaginary version of them (the reformed version, the softened version, the one who is one honest conversation away) and deals with that version instead: forgiving the real man on the imaginary man's behalf, standing in the fall line because the tree, any season now, will surely straighten. It feels like innocent hopefulness, and it is usually praised as seeing the best in people. But look at what it actually does. It declines the tree that exists in favour of a tree you have designed, and designing another person's shape is not hope. It is a hand laid on wood that was never yours to train. The verdict-passer plays God by closing the account; the hopeful redesigner plays God by rewriting it. Both are playing judge. The only seeing that is actually about the other person, rather than about your preferred future for them, is diakrisis again: the lean as it leans, the fruit as it comes.

The one real exception is the sapling. Children are still in the growing years: their wood is being laid down now, and the continuous, patient force that never reshapes a mature tree is exactly the force that works on them. That is what raising them is. But even there the humility holds, as any parent discovers early. A gardener shapes conditions, not wood: he stakes, waters, prunes, clears the ground so the light falls where it should, and the tree still does every inch of the growing itself, in its own direction, with a will that was visibly its own from the first season. Even a child, half-formed, will do what the child wants to do. The window while the wood is soft is real; it is a window for tending, not for drafting.

Wood that will not bear

It is worth noticing, finally, that the tradition which forbids us the verdict does not spare us the imagery. Jesus talked about trees constantly, and never sentimentally. The tree is known by its fruit. The barren fig tree gets its extra year of digging and manure (the continuous force, applied while application is still possible) and then the question is asked: why should it use up the ground? And in John's gospel the image reaches its coldest and most clarifying point. The branch that does not abide, that produces nothing, is not punished. It is not lectured, and no lightning is sent for it. It is gathered — and the reason given is one of simple utility: vine wood is famously useless. You cannot build with it, carve it, or make a peg of it. Wood that will not bear has exactly one remaining function, and that function is fuel.

There is no cruelty in the observation, which is what makes it so severe. The fire is not a torment devised for the branch. It is just what is left to do with wood, once the wood has finally and completely become its shape.

But be careful what the imagery is for, because it is easy to walk away from it holding the wrong licence. Nothing in it hands us the torch. The fire in these images belongs to God and to the end of things; what is handed to us, in the meantime, runs entirely the other way. It is the vinedresser who pleads for the barren tree: let it alone this year also, till I dig around it and put on manure. It is the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine for the one that is lost, and a grace given while we were still sinners: at our least useful, our least deserving. A faith whose founder died for people precisely when they produced nothing cannot be conscripted into discarding people because they produce nothing for us. To value a human being by his usefulness is not a hard version of the faith; it is the exact inversion of it. The imagery of the fruitless tree is addressed to each of us about our own wood (is it bearing?), and to the discernment of anyone who must live near a tree that harms them. It licenses distance. It never licenses disposal: you may step out of the fall line, and you may stop arguing with the shape, but the gathering and the burning were never delegated, and the God who reserved them is the same one still digging around the roots.

And the imagery ends where it ought to end: at our own growing edge. However old the trees around us, each of us is laying down a ring today. The heartwood is past; the cambium never is. Day by day, layer by layer, we shape the tree we are becoming and are shaped by the tree we have already become: every routing chosen today runs a little easier tomorrow, in whichever direction it was chosen. Nobody sets out to become the man in this essay. He was assembled at the growing edge, one small, deniable ring at a time. So, at this very moment, are we.