This year, my fig tree is producing lots of fruit. Unfortunately for me, the birds in my garden also have a taste for figs and so I have taken to picking the fruit before it is fully ripe, since the birds swiftly demolish any that I miss. Even then, about half the figs I harvest contain a grub or two who have eaten their way through a good part of the flesh.
And so, as I was reading the words of my daily prayer for Sunday morning: Come and shelter under the tree of life, enjoy the cool shade and taste its fruit my mind went straight to my fig tree. In my imagination, I picked a ripe fruit and settled myself down on a shady chair – but I stopped myself short, did I dare take a big bite? What if it were full of grubs? Could the fruit of the tree of life have grubs in? Surely not, since heaven, where the tree of life is found, is perfect! Surely there is no place in paradise for grubs, slugs, nettles and everything else that causes me trouble?!
Of course, this is a philosophical question, it being highly unlikely that the afterlife will resemble life on Earth, and perhaps I shouldn’t make so much of symbols anyway, particularly apocalyptic ones? But it did strike me that perhaps at least some of the fruit of the tree of life would contain grubs. The insects they will grow into have a role to play in the ecosystem, just like the birds who enjoy their figs as much as I do.
It’s interesting to notice that I can come to terms with sharing the fruit of the tree of life with the grubs and the birds, while sharing the figs from my own tree is much more problematic. I think that, since I planted and tended the tree, I see them as my figs, that I have an exclusive right to them.
It looks like the problem here might be my selfishness and anthropocentrism! Maybe heaven, the kingdom of God, is where I can share my figs with the birds and the insects without begrudging them their share, after all:
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
Isaiah 11:6