Common Ground Song 136 ‘Tree of Life’
Words / Music: Marty Haugen © GIA Publications, Inc.
YouTube recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEVKGJz4ko8
Featured image: Christ the Tree of Life (Orthodox icon)

This is a suitable choice for the season (we are about half way through this year’s observance of Lent). The notes to this song in Common Ground describe the tune (in D-minor) as ‘austere’. Austere is not the same as sad. Maybe ‘contemplative’ would be a better description (think monastery chapel). Unlike many of Marty Haugen’s songs that have a joyful feel to them, this one lays joy aside, and adopts a serious or contemplative approach to the death and resurrection of Christ.

In the five verses (words are in the linked video), we align ourselves with Christ’s experience. His death is ours (if not bodily, at least in the sense of death to selfishness). His broken body is the cure for ‘every person lost and broken’. His ‘truth once spoken’ is something we pass on ‘through act and word’. His resurrection is the way that we ‘rise with every morn’. As he ‘leads and we shall follow,’ it is ‘in joy and sorrow’ to quote Haugen’s rhyme.

The fourth of the vie verses is a little different in that it invokes the Holy Spirit. ‘Gentle Jesus, mighty Spirit, come inflame our hearts anew’. The Spirit is the presence of God that enables us to identify with Christ in his suffering and in his new life.

May you continue to move closer to Christ through whatever Lenten observance you are following this year.