A Forest Parable

There were two of us walking that morning.

The morning was mild, the air still cool. The sun was already high among the trees, but the ground still held the night. We ended up sitting on two fallen logs, the Bible open between us, and we read — that passage where two men walk toward a village called Emmaus, their hearts heavy, talking about everything that had just collapsed.

My friend doesn't believe. He doesn't pretend to, either, and that's why I love walking with him: he asks the real questions. Why is the world so beautiful and so broken at once? Why this sense that something, somewhere, has cracked — and that we can't seem to mend it?

So we traced the thread back, from the very beginning. Not like a lecture: like a story told at the pace of the pages — and the forest around us seemed to be telling it at the same time.

Light came through the leaves above our heads, and wherever it fell, something was alive: the moss, the insect, the breathing leaf. That is where it all begins. The gift: a word, and light; a word, and life rising from the earth. And above it all, someone made in the image of God, made to love and to respond. Each time, the same word returns: it was good.

But our two logs lay on the ground, overrun with moss. They had lived, and something had laid them low. The breaking: a trust broken, a distance opening, the man hiding from God behind the trees of the garden. We were sitting on the very image of what we were trying to understand.

And yet the moss was green, and beneath the bark of the trees still standing, the sap was rising again, despite the winter just past. The promise: God who refuses to let go. A covenant, a people, prophets — a long thread of faithfulness running through the centuries as the sap runs through the wood. Invisible, but alive.

A little farther on, the path opened onto a clearing, a break of full light among the dark trunks. The whole thread leads there. The heart: one day, within human time, God himself came to meet us. He announced a Kingdom, he loved to the very end, all the way to the cross; and on the morning of the third day, the tomb was empty. The clearing in the middle of the dark forest is just that: the opening through which light entered the night of the world.

Then the wind rose in the leaves, and the whole canopy began to murmur. The breath: the Risen One did not leave his own as orphans. He sent his Spirit, and a community was born — not out of a programme, but out of a wind. A new life, given, free.

My friend was listening. I added nothing. There are silences worth more than explanations.

And I remembered that, on the road to Emmaus, the two walkers understood nothing either: they were walking with the Risen One without recognising him, while he patiently reopened the whole of Scripture to them. I don't know what happened in my friend that morning. It is not my business, and it is not in my power. I only know that as I closed the book, it was my own heart that was burning.

At Emmaus it was evening, and they said: stay, for the day is nearly over. For us it was morning — and the light was slowly reaching the ground that still held the night.

We stood up. The path went on ahead of us, climbing and disappearing among the trees; we could not see its end. But a story that begins with a gift and passes through a promise does not end in emptiness: it moves toward a fullness, toward a world at last raised up, where what we take for an ending turns out to be a beginning.

So we walked.