The Tree and Her Fruit

Four trees in Wisdom's book

Proverbs plants the tree of life four times, and the four plantings are a single portrait assembling. The first is the crown of Lady Wisdom herself: "She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her" (3:18) — Wisdom, the woman priced above rubies, is the tree; laying hold of her is laying hold of it. The second: "The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life" (11:30) — the righteous person's fruit becomes a tree in its turn: eaters become planters; the orchard propagates. The third: "hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life" (13:12) — desire fulfilled, the wanting honored, is the tree arriving. And the fourth: "A wholesome tongue is a tree of life" (15:4) — a healing tongue, the law of kindness spoken, is the tree in a mouth.

Read the four as one: the tree of life is a feminine-named Wisdom, propagating through the fruit of the righteous, arriving as fulfilled desire, speaking as a healing tongue. Hold that portrait. The Book of Mormon is about to confirm every line of it — and add a face.

The guarded garden

The tree enters scripture in Eden, at the garden's center beside the tree of knowledge — and exits behind cherubim and a flaming sword. Read the guard rightly, because Alma does: "if it had been possible for Adam to have partaken of the fruit of the tree of life at that time, there would have been no death, and the word would have been void, making God a liar" — so "the Lord God placed cherubim and the flaming sword, that he should not partake of the fruit — And thus we see, that there was a time granted unto man to repent, yea, a probationary time" (Alma 12:23–24, 26). The guard is not punishment; it is mercy with a sword: the tree withheld so that no soul would be sealed into an unfinished state — life deferred so that life, when finally taken, would be taken ripe. The whole plan of redemption is the long, supervised walk back to that tree — which is why, when the tree reappears in vision six centuries before Christ, the entire landscape around it is the walk.

The dream: the tree, and everyone in motion

Lehi's dream (1 Nephi 8) is the tree of life with the probation drawn in around it: a dark and dreary waste, a field, a river, a rod of iron, a strait and narrow path, mists, a great and spacious building — and at the center, "a tree, whose fruit was desirable to make one happy." He goes forward and eats: "most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted... white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever seen... it filled my soul with exceedingly great joy."

And then mark, before anything else in the dream, Lehi's first instinct after tasting: "wherefore, I began to be desirous that my family should partake of it also" (8:12) — he looks up from the fruit and scans the dark for Sariah, Sam, Nephi, Laman, Lemuel; he beckons; "and it came to pass that they did come unto me and partake." The fruit's first recorded effect is not private ecstasy. It is the immediate conversion of the eater into a feeder — joy that instantly becomes invitation, sweetness that cannot be swallowed without turning toward the family — Proverbs 11:30 performed: the fruit of the righteous becoming, in the same hour, a tree of life for others. Whatever this fruit is, its chemistry is social: it metabolizes directly into beckoning.

The interpretation: a mother and her child

Then Nephi, desiring to know the things his father saw, is caught up — and what follows is one of the most quietly astonishing interpretive sequences in all scripture. Nephi asks the meaning of the tree. And the Spirit does not hand him a definition. He is shown a city — Nazareth — and in it "a virgin, most beautiful and fair above all other virgins." The angel asks what he beholds, then declares: "the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh." Nephi watches her "carried away in the Spirit"; and then: "I beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms. And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God... Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw?" (1 Nephi 11:13–21).

Attend to the structure: the question was what is the tree? — and the answer shown, before a word of definition, is a mother with a child in her arms. Only after the mother-and-child image does Nephi answer: "Yea, it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things" — and the angel completes it: "Yea, and the most joyous to the soul" (11:22–23). Scholars of the ancient Near East have noted (offered here plainly as scholarship, held loosely) that Israel's older world knew the sacred tree as a mother-symbol — which would make the vision's pedagogy exquisitely precise for a prophet trained in that world: shown a mother, he recognizes the tree. But the doctrine stands on the text alone, no scholarship needed: when heaven wanted to teach what the tree of life is, it displayed maternity — the love of God, pictured as a mother holding the child she has borne and will nurse and will watch die and will receive again. The condescension of God (11:16, the angel's own frame) is shown twice in the sequence — God the Son descending to be carried in arms, and the love of God rendered visible as the woman carrying him. The tree's meaning arrived wearing her face.

Sheddeth itself abroad

Now the verb, because Nephi's definition contains the tree's whole mode of operation: the love of God "sheddeth itself abroad." Trees shed — it is the one thing trees do with their fruit: no marketing, no gatekeeping, no aim — the ripe thing simply falls, abroad, to whoever stands beneath; seed scattered past every fence; shade cast on the just and the unjust. The love of God distributes itself the way an orchard does: freely, downward, indiscriminately, and in season — which is the two-windows economy and the drawing's universality stated as botany.

And the phrase has a twin across the ocean, in Paul: "the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us" (Romans 5:5) — the same idiom, with the agent named: the Spirit is the shedder; the third member of the Godhead is the tree's distribution system, carrying the fruit from the branches into hearts — grace's own courier, metering the sweetness to the desire (which is why the tree's third Proverbs planting was "when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life": the fruit lands where the wanting is). Truth and grace meet in the dream's own geography: the rod of iron — "the word of God" (11:25) — is truth's rail, straight, unbending, gripped hand over hand through the mists; and it leads to the tree — love, sweet and white and shedding. The word delivers you to the love; the bone carries you to the marrow; truth's whole function in the dream is to be the path to grace's fruit — and a person clinging to the rod who never arrives at the tree has mistaken the rail for the destination, while a person lunging for the tree without the rod is lost in the mist before the first taste. Charity — the tree's fruit — is reached by truth and received as grace: the dream is the series' anatomy, drawn as a map.

The orchard in you

Then Alma takes the tree and does the thing this series keeps finding: he internalizes it. The seed planted in the heart, nourished with faith and diligence and patience, "shall take root; and behold it shall be a tree springing up unto everlasting life" — in you — and then the harvest, in words lifted straight from Lehi's mouth: "ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is most precious, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white" (Alma 32:41–42). The verbatim echo is the doctrine: the tree Lehi walked to, Alma grows inside the believer — you do not merely visit the tree of life; by nourishment and patience you become its soil, and then its orchard — Proverbs 11:30 again, now as horticulture: the fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, eaters become feeders, the beckoning father becomes the standing grove. And Alma's altar-call names the price: "come unto me and ye shall partake of the fruit of the tree of life; yea, ye shall eat and drink of the bread and the waters of life freely" (Alma 5:34) — freely: without money and without price, the unfenced table, the shedding tree's only terms.

The leaves for the nations

And the tree keeps its appointments at both ends of the book. To the churches, the risen Lord's first promise — in the same letters as the white stone — is the garden reopened: "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God" (Revelation 2:7): the cherubim's assignment complete, the probation served, the ripe finally admitted to the fruit. And in the last chapter of scripture, the tree stands in the New Jerusalem — "in the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life" — a tree somehow on both banks, spanning the water of life like a living bridge — "which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (22:2). Weigh the grammar the King James keeps: "yielded her fruit" — the tree is a she to the end — bearing by the month like a mother's own calendar, twelve fruits for twelve tribes, everyone's kind provided; and even her leaves — the parts no one plants or prizes, the parts trees shed most freely of all — are medicine, and the patient is the nations: healing at civilization scale, falling from the branches of a tree whose meaning was shown to a young prophet as a woman with a child in her arms. The wholesome tongue was a tree of life; here the tree has become the wholesome tongue of the whole city.

Lay hold, and shed

So gather the portrait Proverbs began: the tree of life is Wisdom, feminine-named, priced above rubies — and the love of God, defined by its shedding — and the vision heaven chose for it is a mother and child — and its fruit converts every eater into a feeder within the hour — and by Alma's horticulture it grows in the person, until the person stands in the dark field as a grove for others — and at the end her monthly fruit feeds the city and her fallen leaves heal the nations. The tree does not sell, fence, meter, or withhold. She sheds. That is the divine feminine's whole economy in one botanical fact, and it is the most joyous thing a soul can taste, and the instant you taste it you will do what Lehi did before the sweetness left his tongue: turn toward the dark, find your family, and beckon.

Lay hold upon her, and retain her. Then stand still long enough to fruit — and let it fall abroad.

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It is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things. Yea, and the most joyous to the soul.