As a five-year-old, I had no doubt that the color plates in the blue Bible Story Books were simply openings through which the realities of the world appeared in frozen moments?a sort of "best of" photojournalism montage of the ages. The paintings are rendered in excruciating detail; it takes little faith to believe that the Red Sea actually parted when confronted with the aquarium-like walls of water in the Blue Book Exodus. Hebrew children hold their parents? hands like good children crossing the street. They point out interesting fish in the water walls as they walk down the sandy aisle in their sandals. Photo-real paintings of floating axe heads and arks, falling giants and manna, shining clouds and chariots, impressed on me the three-dimensional truth of the scripture.

My mouth watered for manna while I imagined the taste of the Pillsbury Doughboy's biscuits; I picked up logs the size of Goliath's sword and assured myself that I had the strength of a giant-slayer. I even tried running "lightly" across mud puddles to test whether I was one who could muster the proper quantity of faith. And I nervously watched shining sunset clouds that were about the size of a man's hand. One day, I knew, one of these clouds would explode into an atomic mushroom of angels and trumpets. I shuddered at the color-plate prophecy in the last chapter of the Blue Books entitled "God Wins at Last."

And so it is with a certain amount of guilt that I have to admit I do not want to enter through the color plate window into Blue heaven and recline on the manicured lawn under the Tree of Life. This Tree of Life grows beside a tame glass river and shades white children dressed in Sabbath clothes. It makes me nervous. The scene looks entirely too much like a Prozac advertisement. I can almost hear the buzzing of a halogen sun that never turns off. And then I realize with dreadful clarity that the Tree of Life grows on the manicured grounds of a mental hospital, where nurses with white robes and gold crowns never raise their voices and Valium-lidded patients never stop smiling. This Tree of Life was never part of a forest. It was planted after clear-cutting. It bears a different fruit every month in dreadful scheduled repetition. And the trees in the distance are an orchard, not a jungle. Light filters through a pruned canopy, puddling rows of symmetrical shadows.

Perhaps the Tree of Life does not actually straddle a crystal stream on the manicured grounds of Prozac heaven, where the sprinklers are tastefully recessed and the offering calls must last no longer than two minutes.

I have camped in an old-growth forest of sequoia trees and wondered at their survival secrets. Concrete pillars, reinforced with steel re-bar, the age and size of these trees, would be crumbling like the Parthenon by now. But these trees grow stronger with years?another ring, another six inches deeper or wider into the earth. The taproots must be warming by now to the heat of some deep secret core. Here is life that is wild and stronger at the end of each brutal winter.

This Tree that moans above me must have been born at a time when Christ fell under his own tree. The jay (if jays eat sequoia nuts) hopped over this nut instead of eating it. The earth softened at this particular spot, opened up a small depression for the seed. A spring rivulet carved around this seed, sparing it the oblivion of others carried off to sea.

It lay buried for a decade?maybe two?before lightning struck on an adjacent ridge. Holy fire swept through the forest, cracked the hard outer shell, blistered sweet inner meat. And in the Spirit pain, life began'small and green at first, pushing up through ash, growing through the blackness, naked on a hill where the needles of ages past had been bush-burned in the night. Take off your shoes. This is the charred remains of holy ground.

This Tree, conceived in fire, will not be moved. Annie Dillard writes of one such tree that was struck by lightning in a July storm. The upper branches smoldered for months until an October snowstorm doused the burning. This is a Tree of Life. Shudder. Strain closer to the core of things. Whisper survival secrets to those who are as lucky to live as you are.

My own Tree of Life straddles two continents and contains some years of violent growth rings. My great-grandfather marched north with Cecil Rhodes to kill the Matabele for God, empire, and an African farm. My grandfather, Samuel van Rooyen, or Oupa Sam as we know him, left the farm in Rhodesia after he found his father with an African spear pinning his right forearm to his throat. Oupa Sam moved into my grandmother's boarding house in South Africa while her first husband was away fighting the War. First he moved into a room. Then he moved into her bed. My father, Jan Christian Smuts van Rooyen, was named after a famous South African general. He attended his parents? wedding when he was six.

Oupa Sam, a six-foot-six gold miner, spent two hours every morning in a cart, descending mine shafts into the African earth where he and his crew blasted away at the rock in search of gold. After a full day underground they spent two hours being hauled back to daylight. Oupa Sam was counted lucky by some?in the twisted way that luck is measured inside the ground. The miners in his crew went a long time without drilling into unspent explosives or tunneling into underground lakes. For this combination of luck and bravery they called him Mballung, an African mining camp euphemism meaning "Big Balls." I saw Oupa Sam for the first and only time when I was seven. He was in the hospital and his toes were rotting off from diabetes. "Smutsie, you have a lovely family," he told my father. I was scared of him even as he lay on the hospital bed with black feet sticking out from under the sheet. This, I thought, was no place for Mballung.

My mother did not attend her parents? wedding. They did things the old-fashioned way?matrimony before conception. Quaker sap flows strong in our family. This means that the dark core of things often remains unspoken. Great-great-grandfather Uriah E. Thomas was the king of Quaker cheer?even as he fought in an Indiana cavalry unit during the Civil War.

On July 8, 1863, he wrote home about a near-death experience, "the firing had continued some twenty minutes when a solid shot struck the ground just in front of my horse's head, tearing up the ground and throwing sand and gravel into my face with such force as almost brought me to the ground. A rock the size of a hen's egg struck my horse in the head and brought him to his knees. The shot glanced over us and no damage. I thought I was kilt outright for a moment but after rubbing the dirt out of my eyes I found that I was as sound as a brick, but it was close shavings." Later in the war, Uriah was captured and languished in Andersonville prison, the Confederate concentration camp in Georgia. After the war he refused to discuss the details of life as a POW. This, perhaps, was too dark even for Quaker faith.

My grandfather Ralph Moore sold his medical practice when my mother graduated from high school and moved the family to Botswana. My mother went to South Africa, where she met my father. They linked little fingers at Friday night vespers. She left a few months later. He quit school to work in a junk yard to earn passage to the United States and then worked in a cookie factory to put himself through theology school. They were married four years before I was born.

And now my wife and I are at the growing point. The rings laid down before us are close to our centers. She follows her father and my grandfather'studies to be a doctor. She puts on a white lab coat in the morning and returns from the hospital sometimes stained with blood. I spend my days searching for words with meaning'sometimes in a courtroom, sometimes in a church, sometimes in yellow letters penned by Uriah E. Thomas. There are times when I believe I am kilt outright and then, after I rub the dirt out of my eyes, I find I am right as a brick. Oupa Sam is also in me'this man who descended daily three miles deep to hammer at the guts of the earth in search of gold veins.

We are somewhere in the upper branches, where the air is thin and the sky spins and there is no sign of a crystal stream flowing from the throne of God. Sometimes we sit like dazed animals in church pews. Often we don't. We reel at the vertigo and pray for an anointing. Lightning. A Pentecost. Tongues of flame. A smoldering that will sustain us until some October storm arrives. We will add another ring. Hold on through the winter. Strain closer to the core of things. Whisper survival secrets. Thrill to the feel of spring sap rising in this Tree of Life. '