If you want to burn wood, it’s better if the wood’s drier. This is an obvious truth. The moisture content soaks up some of the heat, and this complicates both lighting the fire in the first place and the relative preponderance of smoky puffs of steam while the fire’s going.

But if I remember anything from having a wood stove when I was younger, it’s this. White birch is a little marvel. Its bark is suitable for fabricating canoes, handicrafts, and artwork, and the same properties that push it in those directions also make it remarkably happy to burn when wet. Birch bark takes to the flame despite the gap between wet and dry. And once what’s encased within the bark is exposed to the air, it dries out for use as firewood quite fast. Its burning temperature, too, is actually quite pleasant to be around. In short, burning birch is neither too slow on the uptake, nor takes long to get around to, nor is uncomfortably hot to get close to.

This little vignette isn’t just a nice remembrance, a locus of contemplation and thanksgiving during the Season of Creation. I think it can be used to illustrate a point about the spiritual life.

The Church’s Mystical Doctor, John of the Cross, was fond of the image of burning firewood. It takes centre stage in the Living Flame of Love. It also features in earlier work of his (Dark Night 2.10.1–4). In using this metaphor, one of the saint’s points is that the wetness of the wood has to be burned off if the wood is to become flame. We are the wood. The flame is God/supernatural grace. The moisture indicates disordered aspects of our soul. The wetter, the less amenable to becoming fire; but the moisture can be removed eventually if the wood stays alight. That process involves generating some unsightly puffs of steam and smoke.

So why mention white birch in particular? What does this example from the natural world contribute to the conversation?

Moisture in general might be incompatible with the flame. But what birch shows us is that, contrary to general expectations, a tree’s moisture doesn’t necessarily hinder or inhibit the flame taking hold in the first place. Wet white birch bark readily ignites.

I think too that there are some kinds of inconsistencies between us and the Divine Flame—which always, everywhere, and continuously seeks to convert us into Itself—that are moisture of the white-birch kind.

I’m thinking in particular, but not exclusively, of psychological injury. The latent memories, shattered boundaries, incomprehensible instincts, and neurological rewiring that are typical of trauma create a rift between the conscious, moral plane, on the one hand, and the below-conscious, underground crevices of the human personality, on the other. The traumatized personality experiences a discontinuity. Indeed, as the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain has suggested, the conscious realm can be very highly evangelized, while the below-rational realm of the psyche can remain caught in the exact opposite:

Take now a man who has undergone in his early childhood psychic traumatisms now completely forgotten, and which have produced in his unconscious (infraconscious, “Freudian unconscious”) serious troubles. There is in him, consequently, a discontinuity between the conscious state of psychic activity and the unconscious state of psychic activity. Let us suppose that this man possesses the moral virtues. They will be able to exist at a very high degree under the first state and at a very low degree under the second, whether it is a question of the perverse and regressive tendencies in which he delights in his unconscious, or of the compensations of pride and of egoism… which without his suspecting it his unconscious introduces into the exercise (conscious) itself of his virtues. Here we have two simultaneous states, but this is possible only thanks to a sort of partition but not complete between the world where his conscious activity and that where his unconscious activity (centered on dream and on instinct) have respectively their seat.[1]

Of themselves, these two planes—the psychological and the rational-moral—are distinct. They connote a difference of level. The difference can exist in continuity and integrity. But so too can intense shock or prolonged pressure on the lower level, the psychological or infrarational, create a disjunction between it and the higher.

Such a chasm is like a kind of moisture in the fibres of the soul. As the Divine Flame works on the material, steam has to come out. What we see doesn’t appear like pure fire. Materially, the appearance—if we were to dare to judge by appearances—is identical to the removal of wilfully sinful inclinations in the soul.

But my point here is that not everything that’s materially a release of moisture is necessarily of the same source.

There are two paths well worth distinguishing. In one, water seeps in and locks itself into the fibrous space created by the nothing-doing of sin. In the other, water finds its way into the soul, the psychical dynamism, by means of trauma and other dislocations of a fundamentally non-moral nature.

Evacuation of these moistures of the soul happens under any heating. The basic observation made is the same. Underlying realities, however, are different.

The removal of wilfully sinful inclinations, especially those that touch not just externals but the deeper vices of the spirit, takes time. John of the Cross allows for the fact that God isn’t bound to the same itinerary and step-by-step recipe for everyone (e.g., Living Flame 3.59). But the general trajectory is usually the same. The purification of the deeper roots in the spirit only makes sense after the purification of the more external senses. Some of these puffs of unsightly steam and smoke take a while to run into. The heat doesn’t get to them right away.

In contrast, we have birch. Some material catches fire readily enough when wet, takes less time for its bulk to reach a usable state, and produces a heat that is not overwhelming but remains pleasant to be around. I’d like to think that’s true of the little ones who have been broken into vulnerable pieces of disconnected rational-moral and infrarational-psychological self. The former might burn well, while the latter sends out steam and smoke—yet they’re not the painful elimination of sinful inclinations. They’re the painful, embarrassing, shameful emission of psychological injuries washed into the grain of the wood. To the unsympathetic observer, the two experiences might look alike. But the difference is substantial.

The moisture in some layers of the birch didn’t hinder it from catching fire. The bulk was ready pretty fast. Moreover, it burns at a pleasant temperature that doesn’t really push anyone away.

At the final day, when the Flame takes all and its concomitant Light penetrates each nook and cranny of creation—at that moment, the pain, embarrassment, and shame of this wet wood will have been definitively driven out, even as something of its historical presence remains. Oh, then, we will realize: this one was birch, not pine or elm or oak. Even though we were witnesses to the removal of moisture, this one took readily to the flame, and that’s why, that’s why, it was so good to be around.

[1] Jacques Maritain, On the Grace and Humanity of Jesus, trans. Joseph W. Evans (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 79. Italics original.