The Work of Our Hands: To Bless the Trees

Katie Owen Aumann

A Blessing upon Planting of Trees
God our Creator,
Bless the earth below our feet,
that it will provide nourishment and stability for the trees.
Bless these trees with deep roots and strong
branches, that they may live far beyond our lifetimes.
Bless those who will find shade and shelter in these trees,
people, birds, animals, and all God’s creatures.
Bless this church, the neighborhood, and the city,
called to work together to be stewards of creation.
Bless each of us as we go about the work of planting. 
Make us partners with God
in tending and celebrating this world in which we live,
that it may be rooted and grounded in love. 

I’ve been asked to offer blessings in a lot of different settings throughout my years as a pastor. I’ve blessed children, pets, dinner tables, new homes, backpacks, marriages, and burials. I’ve been asked at the last minute to say the blessing at a wedding reception so many times that I keep a prayer saved in my phone to pull out at a moment’s notice. But I had never blessed a tree, until this year. 

As my congregation prepared to celebrate our church’s centennial, we planned and prayed and plotted how we would mark this particular moment in the life of the church. The committee centered on Ephesians 3:16–17 as a galvanizing Scripture passage for the occasion: 

I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.

The phrase “rooted and grounded” stuck out to many in light of the beautiful land on which the church was built. The church’s creation care team had spent months tending the property in preparation to certify a portion of the property as a bird sanctuary. They removed non-native species and cleared brush in order that it would be a sanctuary, a place of praise, for God’s winged creatures. Knowing this was in the works, the centennial planning team said, “What if we plant a tree as part of our centennial celebrations? It’s a reminder that God’s natural sanctuary was here before the church was built, and we hope God will be praised through us and through creation for hundreds of years to come.” 

Next came the logistics. We budgeted to plant one tree. Upon reaching out to a local nonprofit that helps with re-greening across the city, Trees Atlanta responded, “How about forty?!” They offered to pay for all the trees if we could provide the land, a place for the trees to be rooted and grounded in love. There was something biblically significant about planting forty trees in the wilderness on our church property, a reminder that God shows up in the wilderness with blessings and provision we couldn’t imagine. 

God had provided this unexpected blessing of trees. Now we had to provide the labor. Planting one tree is a manageable task for a few folk, but forty required a community-wide effort. We put out a sign-up at the church, as did Trees Atlanta, and we were anticipating a few dozen people, which felt like a mammoth task. But as we gathered on a fall Saturday morning, nearly seventy-five people showed up. Half were church members ranging in age from two to over eighty, but the other half were new friends from across the city—a Chinese cultural youth group, a young adult new to the city looking for a way to serve and meet friends, a few folk who joined us after passing by the local farmer’s market in our church parking lot. The city arborist showed up alongside the experts from Trees Atlanta. The group of volunteers was as diverse in age, race, and religion as the city these trees would soon call home. 

We gathered in our church’s memorial garden before we would scatter in small groups across the property to plant forty trees together. We weren’t there for a worship service, but being together in that outdoor space felt worshipful. We were enacting what our congregation does inside our sanctuary every Sunday—gathering as God’s people to worship so that we could be scattered out into the world to serve. At the same time, most of the volunteers in attendance didn’t sign up planning to hear about Jesus or do anything particularly “churchy.” Our property was, to them, simply a place to plant a tree. After instructions from the experts at Trees Atlanta about how to plant, they handed the floor to me to offer a welcome and a blessing. 

How do I take this interfaith, intercultural community event happening on church property and transform it from a secular volunteer opportunity into a sacred moment? 

How do I offer a spoken liturgical moment that mirrors the “work of the people” we were about to do together? 

After offering a brief word of welcome, I asked that we pause for a blessing. There are lots of ways to define a blessing. In this setting, a blessing was a way to pause with intention to acknowledge the importance and value of what we were about to do together, and to invite God, in whatever form we understand the divine, to offer protection and care for us, for the work before us, and for the beneficiaries of our work. As I offered the blessing, I could hear the birds sing in the trees above us, joining us in their natural sanctuary that we were called to plant and tend. 

As Rev. Dr. Lord offered in her reflection on liturgy (see p. 5), this blessing gave language, however brief, not just to the “work of the people” before us in planting trees but to the “public work” that would benefit all those who passed through this place. It was, in her words, “a service act done by . . . a few for the good of the many.” Spoken liturgy in that moment served to set the tone for the embodied work that we would do together—shared across age, gender, religion, neighborhood—for the whole city’s benefit. 

As I reflect on what it meant to bless these trees, I am struck by the way that the spoken blessing gave shape and set the tone for the work that we did together. If the blessing invited intention in our work, the blessing came alive in our actions. We were intentional about where we dug a hole for the tree to call home. We were purposeful in how we broke up the root ball and prepared the tree to thrive. We gave our trees names and thought about who might find shade under Leafy Lawrence and Mellow Yellow. And above all, we connected with each other in a way that was ordinary and yet sacred. In doing so, the words of blessing enacted by the community in our work together surely gave praise and glory to God.