Offering hope to those who have none
In Nagasaki, there once stood a Buddhist house of worship called Sannō Shrine. Within what were the temple grounds there stands a camphor tree that has no business being there. On August 9, 1945, it stood less than a kilometre from ground zero of the atomic bomb blast radius, which exposed it to temperatures 30 times hotter than the sun. It was incinerated, and yet somehow... it’s still there. Around a blackened, irradiated inner core is now fresh bark and a green canopy of leaves. It is, frankly, miraculous. Even more startlingly, I’m told there are many of these trees in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – over 150 in total. They call them hibakujumoku. Survivor trees.
Some 9000km away in Aotearoa, many of us are now unboxing dusty plastic trees and plumping them back into their annual glory.
I watched the other day as my 3-yearold, Luna, joyfully hung baubles and tinsel from the branches. She woke the next morning with the first words – “Thanks for the Christmas tree, Dad!” Honestly, just too cute.
Kids have a way of making Christmas magical again, don’t they? Reinvigorating old traditions with fresh wonder and joy.
And yet as I look at the golden illuminated tree in the corner of our living room, I can’t help but feel that the
camphor tree of Nagasaki might have more in common with the origins of the Christmas story.
This season of Christmas – or Advent, as Christians call it – remembers the coming of Jesus in a nowhere backwater town called Nazareth.
The empire of the time saw his arrival as a threat to its power. They executed a brutal genocide of every boy under 2 years of age to suppress the possibility of revolution.
Chillingly, the Gospel of Matthew tells of the screams of mothers echoing throughout the countryside: “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”
This hits harder with the knowledge that Ramah is now al-Ram, a little Palestinian town just a few kilometres north of Jerusalem behind the separation wall.
Rachel still weeps for her children. One every 10 minutes, so I’m told.
The arrival of the Christ child had no fanfare, no tinsel, no carols. He came amidst the cries of a desperate people longing for liberation. His family fled to the south over the border into Egypt as senseless violence chased them from the north. They ran terrified from the might of empire.
When I consider the origins of this time of year, it confuses me that this has become a season where broken-hearted people feel so out of place and unwelcome.
It seems to me that this is the season made not for further comforting the comfortable or filling the bellies of the full – but for offering hope to those who have none.
It’s about the possibility of life emerging in the most hostile environments. This is a season not for plastic trees, but for the hibakujumoku tree.
Surely there could be nothing more final than an atomic blast ripping through the fibres of a camphor tree. No-one would have believed that one day people might pray and stand in the shade of it as an enduring symbol of hope.
And yet there it still stands, with new life wrapped around its charred trunk.
Perhaps I resonate so deeply with the hibakujumoku tree because it’s a familiar story to me. As a follower of Christ, I stand at the base of a tree of death and wonder how it became a place of life.
I wonder how the crucified God was able to breathe again and rise in hope. And I am filled with wonder that this moment continues to offer shelter to me and so many some 2000 years later.
Around the splintered wood of the cross has grown something totally new and unexpected. Many of us enter this season without the comfort of hindsight. We still sit in the ashes – whether a mother who has lost her son in Gaza, a wife who has lost her husband to old age, or those of us who have lost things which feel less extreme, like friends, jobs, houses, and income.
In the midst of our grief, the invitation of Advent comes naively and suggests that maybe, somehow, in the midst of all of this, we could end up more alive and not less. Our hearts could become softer, and not harder. Our resolve for change could become deeper, and not weaker.
It begs us to look to the camphor tree and to Christ, and to wonder if death really needs to have the final say.
Rev Scottie Reeve is an Anglican priest in Brooklyn, Wellington. He is the author of 21 Elephants – Leaving Religion For the Reckless Way of Jesus, the host of the 21 Elephants podcast, and the national director of the Catch Network.
This is part of a short series on the themes of Advent, as they relate to the world in 2023.