Karen E. McReynolds

Zacchaeus and the Monkey Swing Tree

I was privileged to grow up in the country.  I was raised in rural Merced County, right in the center of the state of California.  My dad was a teacher, so he didn’t have to make a living from the cattle we raised or the fruit we grew; he just did it for fun, and to give us kids the chance to grow up in the country.  I will be forever grateful for this.  Those early experiences –  wandering in the fields behind the house, helping Dad move the irrigation pipes that kept the pasture green, playing with the innumerable batches of kittens the barn cats produced, wanting to be a meadowlark when I grew up – nurtured my love for living things and the out of doors.  On a more basic level, it gave me my love of fruit.  I owe that to Dad’s wisdom in planting one of each kind of fruit tree that would thrive in the San Joaquin Valley.   Nothing can beat fresh figs or plums or apricots or peaches, straight off the tree into the mouth.

My favorite tree on our ten acres of Merced County was a sycamore, Platanus occidentalis.  Although I knew that sycamore was the correct name of my favorite tree, I always thought of it as simply the monkey swing tree.  This tall, sturdy tree, equipped with numerous broad branches that reached out from the trunk at various climbable positions, was the home of the simple swing that provided fun for hours on end.  A thick slab of wood about ten inches across with a hole in the center, sanded thoroughly to avoid any scrapes or pinches, was suspended from a branch by a long sturdy rope with a fat knot on the bottom side.   It hung from the tree about two feet above the ground and could be jumped upon by any approaching child with ease.  The emboldened child, after becoming bored with simply swinging about by kicking herself into motion, could then grab the swing and climb the tree, stopping at any of various points to mount the seat and hurl herself into the air.  I knew every inch of that sycamore; I had jumped off every jumpable place with joy, puzzling and yet glad about the fact that I never pendulumed back far enough to hit the tree. 

Besides growing up in the country in an era when kids were encouraged to play outside, I was also blessed as a child to be raised in a church.  To this day I recite the Lord’s Prayer and the 23^rd Psalm from the King James Version, a legacy of my memory verses in Sunday school several decades ago.  The story of Zacchaeus, the “wee little man” who climbed a tree so he could see Jesus, was as familiar in Sunday schools then as I suppose it is now.  One Sunday when I was about ten and we were reviewing this story, I was quite startled to notice a detail in my Bible that made me sit up and take notice.   The tree that Zacchaeus climbed was a sycamore! It said so right in scripture! (Luke 19:4)  I was linked to Zacchaeus not only by a shared appreciation of sycamore trees but by our mutual desire to see and know Jesus.  This undoubtedly contributed to my decision to give my heart to Christ the following year.

For the first time, the natural world and the world of the Christ-seeker came together for me.  That partnership has grown to become my life work. I now seek ways to draw students into the love of Christ through the witness and the story of the natural world.  The legacy of the monkey swing tree and the man who climbed it back in Galilee abides.  May we welcome Christ as gladly as Zacchaeus did.

Related: Notes from Ms. Frizzle (1); Notes from Ms. Frizzle (2)