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One of the annual rituals in New York at this time of year is for the whole family to take a trip to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. The only problem is that approaching the iconic tree is a herculean task.
From the moment it is ritually lit in early December (this year it was Wednesday, December 1), until Christmas Day the tree area is overcrowded with New Yorkers and locals, and it’s hard to get close if it’s not impossible. the tree itself.
Locals will soon find out that tourists find their way to the tree using the Google Maps app, so they almost always enter the site from Fifth Avenue, and as a result, entry is prohibited. So those citizens who know the area better go through the side and side streets to get a better angle on the glorious tree, and take an annual photo with their family and friends to send to those far ahead.
What is this strange ritual (aren’t all rituals strange and yet magical?) And what does it mean? On the cover the Christmas tree is a symbol of the Christian nature of this city and this country. But is it?
The White House also has a “National Christmas Tree” that was lit on December 2nd this year. But in New York, the tree has taken on a different set of meanings, and no one cares about legalizing what the tree means. What exactly are these meanings?
Have we all become Christians — Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, shamans, etc. — or has the Christmas tree taken on a different meaning? As strong as it is with all its bright bulbs, the tree has become a floating indicator.
The trees remind me of my mother, a Shiite Muslim god, who went to the mausoleum of the Shiite saint Ali ibn Mahziar Ahvazi in our hometown. In the courtyard of the mausoleum was a magnificent tree that was worshiped by its worshipers. Dakhil is a piece of cloth that people hang on tree branches to make a dream come true: the right boy for the daughter, the faithful bride for the son, the success of the spouse’s business, the cure of a relative’s illness, the pregnancy. For a young cousin … Rockefeller Center tree bulbs and Christmas decorations always remind me of those dahlias.
We all look at the same tree, but we see different things.
Post-secular or post-Christian?
The origin of this present tree, which is at the epicenter of the Christmas holiday celebrations, is probably the Roman Saturnalia – or even an older pagan tradition – which eventually became a Christian in Europe. It is believed that German immigrants introduced the symbolic element into the US (early ascetic Christians were strongly opposed to this idea). For Christian immigrants, the tree was replanted in the adopted country that was the relic of their old homeland. The tree eventually merged with the image of Christ Himself.
Today, people continue to see aspects of his memorial biographies in this tree, sites of lost or discarded piety. These symbols, which began as purely pre-Christian pagan icons, have become a ritual of civic post-Christian iconography, an aspect of what the famous American sociologist Robert Bellah called “civil religion.”
Today millions of New Yorkers and tourists visit this tree without paying any special attention to its Christian symbolism and dance on the ice rink around it as if they were participating in a pagan ritual outside of any institutional religious symbolism.
How we read the Christmas tree today cannot be separated from the fate of Christianity itself in a secular or post-secular world.
In his brilliant text of reflection, the famous Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity (2002), describes how Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger used the post-Christian philosophy of a new millennium to rediscover Christianity. But is this for an era called post-secular Christianity, or a secular philosophy for a post-Christian world? Vattimo believes that secularization is in itself a subterfuge or fulfillment of Christianity. But this very assumption is too eschatological for the ears of Jews or Muslims, where the very idea of ”secularism” is a completely foreign proposition.
Tall Trees East and West
If we ignore the anxieties of Christianity and its secular appearance, any claim that is completely independent of any particular religion, trees have magic, grace, and power.
Take the Iranian Abarkuh Cypress – as it is called in Abarkuh, Iran’s Yazd Province. The cypress is believed to be between 4,000 and 5,000 years old, the second oldest tree after the California Methuselah tree. Legend has it that it was planted by Zoroaster, and as a result, the tree is sometimes called Zoroastrian cypress.
There is a vague reference to this legend in the beautiful “Ombra mai fu” in “Largo from Xerxes”, the opening aria of George Frideric Handel’s Serse (1738), in which the mighty Xerxes I sings his favorite tree. :
It was never a shadow
of any plant
dearer and more lovable,
or sweeter.
Soft and beautiful fronds
my dear banana
let Fate smile.
May thunderstorms, lightning and storms
never disturb your dear peace
nor is it profaned by the wind.
Much earlier and longer than Handel’s opera, in classical Persian poetry, the cypress (Sarv) has been a coherent metaphor for the beloved beloved. The origins of such quotations are purely pre-Islamic, as in Zoroastrian sacred texts that eventually reached Persian epic poetry, it was believed that Zoroaster had brought a sample of sacred cypress from paradise to King Goshtasp to celebrate Zoroastrianism. . But in the broad and varied spectrum of Persian poetic lexicon, the cypress acquired its own metaphorical power, which could not be reduced to Islam or Zoroastrianism. The tree had begun to give its metonymic symbolism.
Towards the theology of eco-liberation
In the face of the climatic calamities that are currently afflicting humanity in general, trees – figs or otherwise – have taken on a different importance. Environmental fears of deforestation and desertification have threatened the very possibility of living on the planet. Here all the religious significance or supposed significance that Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, or Islamic traditions can celebrate around these trees must be attributed to the tremendous ecological vitality of all living things.
Precisely because of this, trees have now acquired an ecological, aesthetic and poetic significance beyond the religious symbolism they still call them. Two famous contemporary Iranian artists, Sohrab Sepehri and poet and filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, were overwhelmed by their fascination with trees. The root of all this fascination can be traced back to a passage in Masnavi’s poem, where Rumi celebrates the drunken attitude of the whole universe and finally turns to the trees while they rest in the winter and tell his readers what they think of this winter. all the trees are frozen and bare, but he assures the world:
Don’t think that the garden doesn’t get drunk in the winter,
Don’t be fooled by these drunken fools,
The roots of these trees are secretly drinking
You just have to wait until spring to wake up drunk!
From the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center to Handel’s opera, Kiarostami’s photographs, and Sepehri’s poetry and Rumi’s masterpiece, a constellation of beautiful quotes all unite in search of the metaphysics of planetary morality, beyond our usual condemnation, bad but still patient and beautiful. Mother Earth.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.
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