The Browning-Off of Christmas FIJ

 

The Browning-Off of Christmas - Faith in Jasper Booster Article

 

“Within a lodge of broken bark, the tiny Babe was found.” The Huron Carol

 

Went to Hinton with the kids again this year. Paid $5 at the Mohawk station for a permit to cut down some trees for Christmas. Scrawny, yes, but real!

 

“Mountain pine beetles don't gobble up whole trees. They carry the spores of a blue stain fungus. When other kinds of beetles attempt to bore through the bark of a healthy lodgepole pine, the tree will produce copious amounts of resin as a defense. But fungus colonizes the sapwood and circumvents the natural defensive response of the trees.”

 

Always enjoyed going to the W.’s for Christmas Eve. Every year they would have a lovely tree brought in from B.C., 15ft high, ever so full and deep, deep green! And, oh, the shortbread!

 

“It's a symbiotic relationship. The fungus catches a ride with the beetle while the beetle benefits as the fungus blocks resin production by the tree and allows the beetle to bore beneath the bark to feed, lay its eggs and hide from predators like woodpeckers. Young trees are more resistant -- old stands suffer most.”

 

I notice a lot of people don’t bother with real trees anymore. A lot of homes in Jasper have gone artificial. A tree in a box. No needles. No watering. No aroma. Well, it’s easier, isn’t it?

 

“The fungus causes dehydration of the tree while the beetle larvae eat into the tree's phloem tissue, cutting off its food supply. The combined attack turns the trees' needles a reddish brown, their trunks a greyish blue. It can take as little as two weeks to kill a tree, leaving behind a stark standing skeleton. And each infested tree produces enough new beetles to infect a dozen more.”

 

Our vocabulary borrows much from the trees, for we speak of being “rooted” when we are secure, of being “stumped” when we can’t solve a problem, of our torsos being “trunks” and our arms and legs as “limbs”, of taking a risk by “going out on a limb”, of being “fruitful” when we achieve something, of the “acorn not falling far from the tree” when a child resembles a parent, of our “bark being worse than our bite” (oops! that’s from dogs, isn’t it?) But you get the picture. A lot of people seem stumped these days about what Christmas is really about. In a sense, there has been a browning-off of the vitality of this tremendous season. 

 

“The mountain pine beetle has already decimated an estimated 8.7 million hectares of pine forest in the interior of British Columbia, wiping out trees in an area roughly the size of Vancouver Island or New Brunswick.”

 

You hear some people equate evergreen trees with historical paganism, of life eternal amidst Winter’s death in northern Europe, as if it necessarily backs up a primitive (or au courant) earth worship. But a true symbol is the possession of all people and certainly the property of the tree designer Himself, who came to earth for the express purpose of offering us life eternal by His very dying on a tree.

 

“This year, the beetle killed more than 400 million cubic metres of merchantable timber, up 45 per cent from the year before.”

 

The angels announced that the birth of Jesus was “glad tidings”, “good news of great joy”, a thing of “glory” and the way to “peace on earth”. Yes, the King has come. The ever-green source of Life and Truth has dwelt amongst us. “Emmanuel, God with us”. The shepherds believed and rejoiced. Herod sent out the bark beetles.

 

“At this rate, the B.C. forestry ministry estimates that up to 80 per cent of British Columbia's interior pine stands could be killed by 2013 -- with more than half of them dead by next summer.”

 

Scientists say that the reason the evergreen trees are browning and dying is the proliferation of pine bark beetles, and the reason the pine bark beetles are proliferating is that there hasn’t been a -40 degree cold snap to kill them off, and the reason there hasn’t been such a cold snap in so long is global warming, and the reason there is global warming is mankind’s industrialized, urbanized construction of reality. We are creating a planetary legacy of being the friends of fungus and beetles, the destroyers of whole ecosystems.

 

Isn’t there a spiritual symbol here of vast significance? Our way of life is browning the planet, and that because our souls are already browned, no longer drawing from the waters of life, and so we are hellbent on manufacturing artificial compensations. Minus 40 will save a forest and kill off the burrowing beetles, but to restore life eternal to a human soul and give the deathblow to what lurks beneath our skin, we need the warmth of the Nativity and the 98-degree trickle from a Saviour on Calvary’s tree. If we observed Christmas as eternity breaking into our dying world, would not our legacy be different?

 

Jesus said, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”

 

(Paragraphs in italics are from Paula Simons article “Tiny Beetle is a Huge Menace” from the Edmonton Journal, dated October 21^st, 2006)

         

Pastor Richard Bowler

Jasper Park Baptist Church