The TRee of Life

Genesis doesn’t tell us much detail about what this Tree of Life was or did, but it’s one of those incredibly powerful images that has resonated right through history. It seems that eating the fruit would have made Adam and Eve immortal, and being banned from reaching it led eventually to their deaths (Gen 3:22). It was probably an inspiration for myths like the Fountain of Youth.

Having access to the Tree of Life is seen as a perfect idyllic life – with things as they were before everything went wrong. When the Tree of Life appears in a vision at the end of the Bible, we’re told that its leaves will lead to the healing of the nations (Rev 22:2).

And there’s a clear trajectory in the Bible for how to get there. In the Tabernacle and the Temple, there’s a room called the Holy Place which is decorated to look like the Garden of Eden, complete with trees and a curtain decorated with cherubim. And the only way to reach that room is by doing sacrifices where animals die in your place to take away your sins, and symbolic washing and purification. All of that points to Jesus and the cross and baptism. That is the way to the final Tree of life in Revelation 22, where Eden symbolism and Temple symbolism abound. Jesus also promises those who keep holding on to him through persecution and suffering will receive the right to eat from the Tree of Life (Rev 2:7).

But there’s also another strand in the Bible around the Tree of Life, which isn’t as clearly developed or as famous, but is still there. In Proverbs 3:18 it says that “Wisdom is a tree of life to those who embrace her.” Wisdom in Proverbs is the process of making sense of the world by using God’s word and also practical experience, both our own and that of others. Elsewhere in Proverbs, several good things are described as “a tree of life” – the consequence of righteous living, fulfilled desire and words that heal. (Proverbs 11:30; 13:12; 15:4)

What does the “Tree of Life” mean for autistic people? It means healing – something that can undo the negative physical, psychological and social effects of autism without undoing the positives.

In other words, although we still have to live with the consequences of the Fall for now, there is a future way to the full restoration of what was lost, and even better, because of what Jesus has done. But there is also a way to have something of a partial undoing of the effects of the Fall before the distant future. In this present life, there isn’t an immediate way back to the Tree of Life, but there are ways to get to a tree of life, by using wisdom.

A clear example of that is women experiencing pain in childbirth – it’s directly mentioned in Genesis 3 as a consequence of the Fall. Science is part of wisdom – it is making sense of the world around us from experience. It gives us back some of the good stuff that we lost as a result of the Fall. Specifically, science gives us ways to reduce the pain and danger involved in childbirth. It is a tree of life, and helps to reverse some of the effects of the Fall.

The same applies to autism. There are often ways round the bad bits, and we can often figure them out by reflecting on the world, by listening to wise advice and by trial and improvement. For example, there are ear plugs that can massively reduce my sensory problems in noisy environments, or which cancel background noise altogether. There are even helpful books to enable autistic people to understand this world a bit better and non-autistic people to understand their autistic brothers and sisters!