Now that Spring Mud Season is in full blast, briskly stripping the last snow and ice from the ground, the woods stand revealed without any softening of former white or future green. And they are a mess. Most of the wild trees around here are young second growth--a mixture of deciduous hard- and softwoods and conifers, tall and skinny. The storm snapped thousands and thousands of them, whole painful swathes of ugly fracture, and bent as many thousands over almost double, unnaturally humbled. The trees look *awful*. They hurt the eyes.

A small part of me wants to get out there with a chain saw and put the poor things out of their misery, the way a person might kill a hopelessly ill or wounded animal. No doubt a lot of the trees will die. But the professional arborists say: don't write them off too soon. Trees are incredibly resilient. The bent-over ones may spring back upright with time and warmth; the ones that lost their top third have an excellent chance of pulling through and flourishing once again. Trees are real toughies.

What distresses the arborists terribly are property owners who are insisting on cutting down perfectly good trees--trees that have lost major branches but would definitely survive--because "they're ugly now". There really is something almost obscene, enraging, about this--that a tree could survive all that hell, the slow wrenching off of branch after branch, and come through the storm all ready to survive and grow and leaf out again--and then be sawed down simply because it it doesn't look nice anymore. The great ice storm in January did enough damage; do we really have to add to it?

But that's humanity for you... fortunately, not all of humanity, but it's a common and very sad trait. We don't like wounds, in trees or animals or people; they make us feel scared and vulnerable. They mind us of our own mortality, our own damaged bits, or the possibility that we too could get badly hurt. We like things perfect, symmetrical, "nice", smooth and happy and prosperous, skin unlined and unblemished, limbs sound and whole and young and healthy, bright innocence, no signs of age or wear or trouble. Anything else is ... a little yucky.

Fifty years ago it was common practice among the well-to-do for families to put "damaged" members--epileptics, for instance, or Down's Syndrome children or the mentally ill--in institutions, and then quietly pretend they'd died or had never been born at all. We've learned a little better than that, but we still tend to shoot the wounded in other ways; the way our provincial government treats the poor is an excellent example. If you're poor, you must have deserved it.

We cross the street when we see a friend who's been widowed because his pain makes us uncomfortable. We put down people who have survived the unspeakable for being "weird" or "different" or for "not snapping out of it". We shunt victims of addiction or abuse or war off into special support groups--"they'll know how to look after you there." Or we simply aren't there for them. It's too awkward, too embarrassing.

My listsister Susan Urbach has written movingly of the fear that people feel when they have to deal with a member of what she calls the Trauma Club: "Are you being punished for something you've done in your life? Can you really be a real person? Are you certain that if I touch you I won't catch what you have? How can I face being your family member/friend if you are different than when I first met you?" I think there are two underlying assumptions to the fear: that members of the club must have somehow requested or deserved to be included; and that it's somehow catching. But, as Susan says, to shun the victim revictimizes him or her, and it's often more painful that the original wound.

Some Christians want to see Christ converted into a Success Story --and in a sense, they're right; is there a greater success story than the Resurrection? But the fact is that Christ chose, quite clear-eyed and willingly, to join the Trauma Club--to be wounded and broken, at the bottom, in enormous pain. He chose not to stand with those who shoot the wounded, but with the walking wounded themselves.

For none of us is not wounded, and if we shoot the wounded we shoot ourselves. Not one of us is straight and tall, unbent and without the gashes of experience. Not one of us can boast of any beauty of perfection. It's just that some of us are ready to admit it, and others are too frightened or ashamed.

Christ joined the club because he wanted to be with us, and that's where we all are--some of us consciously, willing to accept our own pain and be tender with others', others of us still frightened and fighting the knowledge, and each other. But with acceptance of membership comes the willingness to love and look after others, a new honesty, a freedom. And keeping up pretences is such an exhausting business....

We are all like the trees hereabouts; not one escaped without some damage, and some are horribly, visibly hurt--but spring is just barely starting, and God only knows how even the worst-hit may leaf out and start to grow in new and potentially more beautiful directions, as the days lengthen and warmth comes back to the country.