Advent Antiphon 6: "Tree hugger?"

Let all the trees of the forest sing a glad hymn,

for on this day they behold one of themselves, ...

being honored with kisses and embraces.

My sixth Antiphon and already I'm cheating? The above quote isn't from our Advent liturgy; it's from a Homily on the Cross by the great ninth-century Orthodox monk St. Theodore the Studite!  What's up?
Each year in November the radio news reports on some splendid tree having just been cut down to begin its journey to New York to be Rockefeller Center's famous Christmas tree for that year. And each year I start to cry when I hear of a venerable old tree ending its life this way. This year's tree was my neighbor--a fellow Hudson Valley resident. That's it in the photo, taken yesterday. It's 60 years old.
But when I see the huge throngs of people who crowd into that space at Rockefeller Center each day during the Christmas season to see that tree, admire it, photograph it, photograph themselves and their family and friends with the tree in the background, I think of what St. Theodore wrote about another famous tree -- the tree of the Cross, in the words above.  He speaks of the trees singing a glad hymn, just as our Advent texts depict the trees clapping their hands.
And then I see a parallel between the Cross and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.  The Christmas tree had to die in order to receive all that adulation from millions of people. And yet it will live, transformed into a new life: converted to timber to build a house.  Jesus had to die in order for the tree of the Cross to become an object of rejoicing by its fellow trees.  And Jesus, too, was transformed into a new, resurrected life.  Just as we will be. How is God transforming you right now?