The Apple Lesson

It has been a warm fall, and clear, except for last few days of rain. Even their damp chill may have contained a blessing. Ten degrees colder, the rain would have been snow. As it was, it greened up the campus for Parents' Weekend, and now the sun has come back for the occasion. The only thing I regret is the loss of a true Indian summer which, though spiritually discerned, always waits for the first snow. It is apple harvest, and the trees are full.

I live on a third of an acre: house, garage, small garden, large self-seeding raspberry patch," and three apple trees. One, the queen, has an aloof, shapely crown and bears at midsummer every second year; its fruit is tart but soft and extremely perishable. The other two are red and golden delicious, gnomelike trees bearing in the fall respectively a crisp cone-shaped apple sweet enough to eat plain and a chubby yellow fruit that is tarter and makes good pies.

But the trees are a presence in themselves and give other gifts than fruit--temporary, concentrated pleasures like the literally incredible sweetness of the air when they are blossoming, and the ozone of softening apples that enters your nose like the tang of smoke after the fruit has started to fall.

My care of the trees has been spotty. When I came here my bookish eyes saw even fruit trees as decoration. Except that I mowed around them and picked an occasional basketful, the trees had to thrive on neglect--which they did, heaping with fruit year after year, dripping apples into the thick grass to rot and feed the ants and turn the lawn hummocky and splotchy as a balding skull.

I write this now with a certain shame. Not that the trees suffered; I don't think they did. But the loss of those harvests, to myself and my neighbors, has become for me an image of waste: an image, because the loss of a few bushels of apples is trivial set in the context of the world's hunger. But still waste--sheer, mindless, unjustifiable waste.

It would be hard to exaggerate the ignorance I brought to this inheritance of three apple trees. It would be hard to exaggerate my ignorance now. I haven't learned much about orchards. What I have learned--the apple lesson-is a moral relationship.

In the last couple of years I have wasted less. (My repentance, though imperfect, has been efficacious unto good works.) I have got the habit of picking regularly through the tide of windfalls, bagging the results and passing them on to my neighbors. I have bought an apple picker; mounted on a broomstick, its spray of stiff wire looks boxy but is surprisingly deft in practice. With it I can reach the highest apples, the ones that seem to redden more brilliantly for being nearer the sun. Groping for them is like fly-fishing the wind: feeling the apple drop is like feeling the vital bang of the fish; drawing in the suddenly heavy, awkward basket hand over hand gives the pleasure of capture as well as the reward of the fruit.

My friends suggest that I sell the fruit (not to them, of course). But the effortlessness of the harvest restrains me. The apples constitute an amazing event of fruitfulness I glimpse only in part, in passing. Even when I spray the codlings, or spread fertilizer around the roots of the trees, I seem to myself to contribute nothing to the process of growth and bearing.

I make my living as a teacher; it is more than adequate. I don't need to make money from the trees. Therefore I am in a privileged position. I can accept the fruit as a gift and give it away as freely as I accept it. To ask for money would break the chain of gifts.

Besides I would feel silly offering the apples to a buyer as mine to sell. I even feel uncomfortable when someone stops by to praise "your trees." Mine? But their life, their harvests, seem independent of me. They are stronger than I am, more fruitful, more dependable, more spontaneous, more self-reliant. I didn't even plant them.

They stand in a river valley, in alluvial topsoil four feet thick and dark as chocolate--immeasurably old, unpredictably fruitful. Being indebted to land so rich would be a kind of honor. But I can hardly claim to be indebted to it, after the years I wasted its produce.

There used to be a "For Rent" sign lying half-buried in the yard next door. That is precise: The earth is only for rent. Who could buy it? Who could pay enough to surmount his sense of its independence and come to believe, really believe, that he was its master?

The rental price is high enough, in all conscience, and the same to anyone: You lease the earth at the price of your life. Some portions of the earth have been leased back and forth from one nation to another for years, at a terrible price in lives. We think of war as a question of ownership. Actually we kill each other for the chance of temporary use, for squatter's rights. And any war, like all modern wars, which destroys the earth over which it is fought is merely absurd, whatever reasons we give for it. It is like the quarrel of two children who smash the toy they both want to play with.

I don't own the land I have a legal deed to. I just happen to be here. Everything that seems so important to me--my living in the Genesee valley, with my family, in my 30s, in this decade of this century--to the valley, all this is accidental. My job is to make my presence here essential. I can only do this by making certain the land profits--or at least does not suffer--for my being here. Even so I may pass it on to someone who will take better care of it than I do, whose presence here will be more to the point than mine.

I hope my shame doesn't seem too exaggerated. After all, what are three trees and a few seasons of apples in the face of global famine? It is no use appealing to the principle of the thing. Too much of the world has been too thoroughly abused, hunger is too widespread and too interlaced with political injustice for simple morals drawn from what happens in my backyard.

On the other hand, if the scale is ludicrously wrong, the scenario may be right. If we learn by analogy rather than by principle, as moralists suggest, the analogy of the apple trees may make me more sensitive to my relation to the world at large.

Also to the meanings of the church. Repentance must bring forth fruit. In my case, the trees bring forth fruit for me, and all I have to do is gather it. The image of waste has turned into an image of grace too plain to ignore.

This transformation of images has a certain bearing on larger affairs. The moral issue behind the energy problem, for instance, is not whether we can pay for the oil we use, or whether when it runs out we will be able to find something else to use in its place. It doesn't matter at all whether the oil runs out now, or whether my children will get the same opportunity to waste it that I have had.

The moral issue is waste.

Oil, like the apples, is in origin a free gift, a form of grace. We didn't make it, cause it, plan for it, nor is it there because we deserve it. All we have done is use it, and waste it.

We have hidden this grace from ourselves with the claim that technical skill is a form of deserving: Having discovered uses for oil and ways to get it out of the ground, we think we have earned the right to do with it as we please. But this finders-keepers argument is beside the point. The moral crux comes at the next step: Having found it, will we keep it? Or will we spend it, or waste it, and on what?

The analogy of oil and apple tree suggests that no part of the creation can be earned or deserved; and that no part can be owned in any sense that allows waste or abuse. Such things always come to us as grace; and though our response ought to be limited and careful, it will never amount to deserving the grace we have been given.

Now this is not the apple lesson; it is only what the apple lesson implies. The apple lesson is how to live with an apple tree. At the moment I am writing this the trees are wet with rain; tomorrow they will be shining again like green fountains in the sun. Looking at them sometimes makes me resolve to treat other parts of the creation with the same reticence they inspire. If the apple lesson can be applied to other things, broader issues, I would be glad to learn it again.

Lionel Basney was a professor of English at Houghton College, in upstate New York, when this article appeared. His review, "Berrigan's Reawakening of Dante's Vision," appeared in the August, 1980, Sojourners.