How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the Spirit of the Christmas Tree
John Robinson
How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the Spirit of the Christmas Tree
|
By Maria Popova
Because life is a cosmos of connection, because to be alive is to be in relationship with the world, because (in the immortal words of John Muir) “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” how we relate to anything is how we relate to everything. There is always a choice in the way we orient to any object of attention — a person, a practice, a song, a stone: the choice to consecrate or commodify the object, to routinize or ritualize the relationship.
Take the Christmas tree. Rooted in pagan solstice rituals that made the evergreen a symbol and a celebration of resilience and eternal life, the modern Christmas tree originated in present-day Germany, around the time Kepler was formulating the laws of planetary motion while defending his mother in a witchcraft trial — that liminal epoch between the age of superstition and the age of science, which, like all transitional times, confused humanity’s ability to understand itself and its place in the universe. In such times, the ready-made answers fall apart and reality itself becomes an arena for power struggles. The Catholic church began splintering along the fault lines of conflicting ideologies, hurling the Western world into endless religious wars. With the need to reaffirm the foundational biblical myths, the naked Christmas tree emerged as an analogue of the tree anchoring Adam and Eve’s story.
One of William Blake’s engravings for Paradise Lost.
It was Martin Luther who, with his genius for selling salvation that powered the Protestant Reformation, dressed the tree in the symbology of the immortal soul — legend has it that a walk through a starlit forest inspired him to adorn the Christmas tree with lights to symbolize the stars, thought to be immortal. (We would eventually lean on Kepler’s science to realize that we are only alive because stars die.)
Suddenly, here was something people could take into their homes to keep their faith and light up their harsh winter nights with the warmth of belonging, their war-torn lives with the promise of immortality.
But it took another quarter millennium and the birth of mass media for the Christmas tree to leave the religious realm and colonize secular life: In 1848, an engraving of the young Queen Victoria and her German cousband Albert appeared in The Illustrated London News — the world’s first illustrated weekly magazine — depicting the royal couple delighting in a lavishly decorated Christmas tree.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the royal Christmas tree. (The Illustrated London News, 1848.)
The image went, as it were, viral — papers across the British Empire reprinted it, sparking a craze for the bedazzled conifer, making it an emblem of the two things human nature most yearns for: love and power. Within a century, capitalism — the religion of our epoch, predicated on packaging our yearnings and selling them back to us at the price of the product — had made of the Christmas tree a commodity, grown like industrial corn and disposed of as garbage.
So here we find ourselves facing that choice of how to relate to the Christmas tree, nested within which is the choice of how to relate to our lives in this world we have not chosen for ourselves but must live in — the choice in which lie our power and our freedom. To find in this commodity the vestige of something ancient and true is to reclaim love as the counterweight to consumerism and the meaning of our mortality.
That is what Brian Doyle — who wrote so movingly about how to live a miraculous life just before death took him at the peak of his powers — invites in a short, splendid piece titled “Muttered Prayer in Thanks for the Under-Genius of Christmas,” part of his altogether wonderful Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary (public library). He writes:
Putting up ye old fir tree last night, and pondering why again we slay a perfectly healthy tree ten years of age, not even a teenager yet, and prop up the body, and drape it with frippery… I saw the quiet pleasure of ritual, the actual no-kidding no-fooling urge to pause and think about other people and their joy, the anticipation of days spent laughing and shouldering in the kitchen, with no agenda and no press of duty. I saw the flash of peace and love under all the shrill selling and tinny theater; and I was thrilled and moved. And then I remembered too that the ostensible reason for it all was the Love being bold and brave enough to assume a form that would bleed and break and despair and die; and I was again moved, and abashed; and I finished untangling the epic knot of lights, shivering yet again with happiness that we were given such a sweet terrible knot of a world to untangle, as best we can, with bumbling love. And so: amen.
Christmas Tree by Frances Hodgkins, New Zealand, 1940s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
This “bumbling love” that consecrates the commodified ritual is, in the end, what consecrates any relation, what returns us to the original responsibility of being alive — something Doyle addresses in another of his “uncommon prayers,” aimed at the Catholic Church and its “thirst for control and rules and power and money rather than the one simple thing the founder insisted on.” Centuries and civilizations after Rumi versed the art of choosing love over not-love, Doyle writes:
Granted, it’s a tough assignment, the original assignment. I get that. Love — Lord help us, could we not have been assigned something easier, like astrophysics or quantum mechanics? But no — love those you cannot love. Love those who are poor and broken and fouled and dirty and sick with sores. Love those who wish to strike you on both cheeks. Love the blowhard, the pompous ass, the arrogant liar. Find the Christ in each heart, even those. Preach the Gospel and only if necessary talk about it. Be the Word. It is easy to advise and pronounce and counsel and suggest and lecture; it is not so easy to do what must be done without sometimes shrieking. Bring love like a bright weapon against the dark… And so: amen.
This way of relating is, of course, a countercultural act of resistance, evocative of Leonard Cohen’s antidote to anger and of Walt Whitman’s instruction for life — resistance to cynicism and all the other species of despair, resistance to the power struggles that fray the cosmos of connection, resistance to anything and anyone who has forgotten and is trying to make us forget that the secret of life is simply to love anyway.
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John Robinson
How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the Spirit of the Christmas Tree
|
By Maria Popova
Because life is a cosmos of connection, because to be alive is to be in relationship with the world, because (in the immortal words of John Muir) “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” how we relate to anything is how we relate to everything. There is always a choice in the way we orient to any object of attention — a person, a practice, a song, a stone: the choice to consecrate or commodify the object, to routinize or ritualize the relationship.
Take the Christmas tree. Rooted in pagan solstice rituals that made the evergreen a symbol and a celebration of resilience and eternal life, the modern Christmas tree originated in present-day Germany, around the time Kepler was formulating the laws of planetary motion while defending his mother in a witchcraft trial — that liminal epoch between the age of superstition and the age of science, which, like all transitional times, confused humanity’s ability to understand itself and its place in the universe. In such times, the ready-made answers fall apart and reality itself becomes an arena for power struggles. The Catholic church began splintering along the fault lines of conflicting ideologies, hurling the Western world into endless religious wars. With the need to reaffirm the foundational biblical myths, the naked Christmas tree emerged as an analogue of the tree anchoring Adam and Eve’s story.
One of William Blake’s engravings for Paradise Lost.
It was Martin Luther who, with his genius for selling salvation that powered the Protestant Reformation, dressed the tree in the symbology of the immortal soul — legend has it that a walk through a starlit forest inspired him to adorn the Christmas tree with lights to symbolize the stars, thought to be immortal. (We would eventually lean on Kepler’s science to realize that we are only alive because stars die.)
Suddenly, here was something people could take into their homes to keep their faith and light up their harsh winter nights with the warmth of belonging, their war-torn lives with the promise of immortality.
But it took another quarter millennium and the birth of mass media for the Christmas tree to leave the religious realm and colonize secular life: In 1848, an engraving of the young Queen Victoria and her German cousband Albert appeared in The Illustrated London News — the world’s first illustrated weekly magazine — depicting the royal couple delighting in a lavishly decorated Christmas tree.
The image went, as it were, viral — papers across the British Empire reprinted it, sparking a craze for the bedazzled conifer, making it an emblem of the two things human nature most yearns for: love and power. Within a century, capitalism — the religion of our epoch, predicated on packaging our yearnings and selling them back to us at the price of the product — had made of the Christmas tree a commodity, grown like industrial corn and disposed of as garbage.
So here we find ourselves facing that choice of how to relate to the Christmas tree, nested within which is the choice of how to relate to our lives in this world we have not chosen for ourselves but must live in — the choice in which lie our power and our freedom. To find in this commodity the vestige of something ancient and true is to reclaim love as the counterweight to consumerism and the meaning of our mortality.
That is what Brian Doyle — who wrote so movingly about how to live a miraculous life just before death took him at the peak of his powers — invites in a short, splendid piece titled “Muttered Prayer in Thanks for the Under-Genius of Christmas,” part of his altogether wonderful Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary (public library). He writes:
Putting up ye old fir tree last night, and pondering why again we slay a perfectly healthy tree ten years of age, not even a teenager yet, and prop up the body, and drape it with frippery… I saw the quiet pleasure of ritual, the actual no-kidding no-fooling urge to pause and think about other people and their joy, the anticipation of days spent laughing and shouldering in the kitchen, with no agenda and no press of duty. I saw the flash of peace and love under all the shrill selling and tinny theater; and I was thrilled and moved. And then I remembered too that the ostensible reason for it all was the Love being bold and brave enough to assume a form that would bleed and break and despair and die; and I was again moved, and abashed; and I finished untangling the epic knot of lights, shivering yet again with happiness that we were given such a sweet terrible knot of a world to untangle, as best we can, with bumbling love. And so: amen.
This “bumbling love” that consecrates the commodified ritual is, in the end, what consecrates any relation, what returns us to the original responsibility of being alive — something Doyle addresses in another of his “uncommon prayers,” aimed at the Catholic Church and its “thirst for control and rules and power and money rather than the one simple thing the founder insisted on.” Centuries and civilizations after Rumi versed the art of choosing love over not-love, Doyle writes:
Granted, it’s a tough assignment, the original assignment. I get that. Love — Lord help us, could we not have been assigned something easier, like astrophysics or quantum mechanics? But no — love those you cannot love. Love those who are poor and broken and fouled and dirty and sick with sores. Love those who wish to strike you on both cheeks. Love the blowhard, the pompous ass, the arrogant liar. Find the Christ in each heart, even those. Preach the Gospel and only if necessary talk about it. Be the Word. It is easy to advise and pronounce and counsel and suggest and lecture; it is not so easy to do what must be done without sometimes shrieking. Bring love like a bright weapon against the dark… And so: amen.
This way of relating is, of course, a countercultural act of resistance, evocative of Leonard Cohen’s antidote to anger and of Walt Whitman’s instruction for life — resistance to cynicism and all the other species of despair, resistance to the power struggles that fray the cosmos of connection, resistance to anything and anyone who has forgotten and is trying to make us forget that the secret of life is simply to love anyway.