You Are a Tree Excerpt, by Joy Clarkson
We are excited to share with you an excerpt from Joy Clarkson’s new book, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, And Prayer (release date February 20, 2024). We thank Icon Media Group for making this possible.
Icon Media Group describes the book as, “Clarkson examines seven ancient metaphors and what readers can learn from paying attention to how we use words and imagery to describe our lives. Through Clarkson’s beautifully written essays, she readies readers to recognize impersonal, industrial ways of talking about themselves and embrace being a human fully designed by God, living more attentively and meaningfully.”
We hope you pick up You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, And Prayer, and enjoy the excerpt below. Be blessed!
Bearing Each Other’s Burdens
By Joy Clarkson
Galatians six says something beautiful: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). In that way you fulfill the law of Christ. It’s the sort of phrase theologians and biblical scholars love to tie themselves in knots over. What exactly did Paul mean? Is “the law of Christ” an idea he develops elsewhere? Or more deeply in Galatians? From my little research, the phrase seems to be something of an enigma. Paul mentions it once, never defines it, and never uses it again. To my untrained eye, I read in this statement the echoes of the new “com- mands” that Christ makes as He is preparing to go to His death: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” ( John 13:34). This is the new law: to love, and to love is to take on the burden of others. Or perhaps it means that in the same way that Christ bears the burdens of our sins (which, given His righteousness, are not burdens He should have to bear), we too should carry burdens that aren’t ours to carry because we have been shown how to do it, because it has been done for us. Mostly simply, I think we can know that in bearing each other’s burdens, in coming alongside each other when what we have to carry is too much for us, we are doing something very holy, something that is close to the heart of what it means to follow Jesus.
Three verses later it says something seemingly contradictory: “each one should carry their own load” (Galatians 6:5). There is a difference between a burden and a load; a load, however heavy and inconvenient, is something we can carry on our own, and should. A merchant must keep all his wares with him in a reasonably portable manner; a pregnant mother may be weary, but she cannot pass her baby to another womb. My load is my load alone. But a burden is different. It is something I might reasonably need help with. If we are to be responsible siblings, partners, parishioners, we must carry our own daily loads, but our inability to carry a burden does not reflect on our strength or godliness; it is simply a fact of life. A boulder will crush you no matter how much you pray or how noble you are.
I hate, hate the feeling of being a burden to other people. My first tendency when my overwhelmed feelings urge me to seek support is to ask myself, Are you just being dramatic? And don’t be mistaken: sometimes I am simply being dra- matic. I can’t help it; perhaps it is how I came out of the womb, or perhaps simply what life has made of me. Drama exists in meI don’t want to burden other people, especially if my burden isn’t really a burden. Or, sometimes, I don’t even want other people to know I am carrying a heavy thing, because it’s embarrassing, or because I am afraid it will make them sad, or because I think, Suck it up, Joy. You can manage this one on your own. Sometimes I make my knapsack out to be a boulder. But quite often, and I have come to realize more often than not, I don’t. In my life, I have occasionally caused a great deal of misery to other people and myself by trying to bear burdens that were impossible for me to carry alone, collapsing under the weight in a carnage of damage that extended beyond myself to the people who would have happily helped.
If you’re asking yourself these questions, I think it is probably a sign that you are bearing a burden, not a load. Don’t wait. Something is troubling you, even if it is only the numbness you feel toward life. Put this book down. Go text someone you know will reply. Ask them to coffee, dinner, a walk, a drink. Tell them you’ve been struggling a bit, and you’d like their perspective and support. And if they don’t respond, text somebody else.
If you have a tendency to be both depressed and dysfunctional, and yet somehow incredibly confident about your capacity to make it in the world and profoundly embarrassed by the idea of someone supporting you when you are meant to be the one supporting others, what I am about to say will sound eminently mockable to you, but I want you to read it and take it seriously: in not letting others bear your burdens you are preventing them from the deep joy and calling of fulfilling the law of Christ. To reject others offering to be love of Christ to you is, in a way, to reject Christ. To be able bear each other’s burdens is a great honor, a holy, dignified thing. To not let other people be Christ to you is to hold a simultaneously very high and low opinion of yourself; low because you do not feel you deserve care, and high because you think you get to decide that’s true. Who are you to rob someone of fulfilling the law of Christ?
I am thankful to a friend who showed me how to think of this. While sharing with her a confusing and seemingly interminable burden in my life I said, “I hope I am not burdening you too much.” She smiled and replied, “I can pick up your burden today. And when I am too tired, I will set it down.” Here, again, thinking about my struggles as a burden I (and my friends) could pick up and set down rather than an elusive heaviness that wafts from one person’s veins to another’s really helped me feel relieved. Even being able to set down my burden for a little while, to put it in the capable hands of another person, made me feel more ready to face life.
There is another way in which it helped. It made me realize that by setting down my burden, I could also look at it, sort through it, check and see if there was anything I needed to take out of the backpack of my life to make carrying it easier.
Sometimes, I think our hesitancy to let other people bear our burdens is that we mistake bearing each other’s burdens with talking about them. Just because we speak to someone about what is heavy in our lives doesn’t mean that they now need to carry that thing. Sometimes what friends offer is not to carry our burdens for us, but to look at our burdens with us, and to tell us, “It’s okay. You don’t need to carry that thing. You can throw it in the trash.” They can help us do what I occasionally do when my work bag has been becoming increasingly heavy without my knowing exactly why— because I’ve been acquiring library books and things from the grocery story that I forgot to unload. Having a friend (or, in some more weighty cases a therapist) look at your burdens with you, decide which ones can be neatly stored away, which ones can go all together, and which ones are just a part of the weight of living can be incredibly helpful. And yet it seems we are often resistant to showing other people our burdens. Why is this? How can we change?
Bethany House, a division of Baker Publishing Group, February 2024, Used by permission.
About Joy
Joy Clarkson is the author of You Are a Tree and host of popular podcast, Speaking with Joy. She is the books editor for Plough Quarterly and a research associate in theology and literature at King’s College London. Joy completed her PhD in theology at the University of St Andrews, where she researched how art can be a resource of hope and consolation. Joy loves daffodils, birdwatching, and a well brewed cup of Yorkshire Gold tea.
For more Joy Clarkson:
https://www.instagram.com/joynessthebrave
https://www.facebook.com/p/Joy-Clarkson-100063508753020
https://joyclarkson.substack.com
Until next time, keep witnessing!
XX
Gabriela Yareliz
Gabriela is a writer, editor and attorney. She loves the art of storytelling, and she is based in NYC.
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