The Cedars of God:  Crown of the Lebanon

As the airliner banked westward over the Lebanon mountain range seeking the approaches to Beirut’s airport, we caught a glimpse of dark, wooded patches on the higher mountain slopes and valleys, all that’s left, a fellow passenger explained, of what were once the ‘Cedars of God’.  So hoary were those cedar forests, he said, that they were already old when the earliest cities of Mesopotamia spun their stories of human origins. The pockets of cedars, now greatly diminished, inhabit hills revered by the ancients as the abode of heroic divinities who sheltered there in the ‘oldest documented forest’ on the planet.    

To those ancients, we learned, the girth and towering stature of the cedars held up the sky itself, and, felled as pillars, brought mountain splendor to palaces, city gates and temples.  And when sacred beings were invoked in chant, when lyric praise in the durbars reached for all that was noble and transcendent, these cedars were named as inspiration and witness. Indeed, the cool shade and spiritual silence of those groves made of them cathedrals surpassing the greatest shrines.  Stand to the leeward of these groves, we were told, and their aroma would make you think of incense, hinting at the perfumes the centuries distilled here: the Chanels and YSLs of other times.  The unmistakable fragrance of peace.

We clambered into a Mercedes Benz taxi at the airport though we had long been happy in the tuk-tuks or even pedicabs of South Asia.  Our route into the city, the driver explained, would take us first through the crowded camps of the thousands displaced by the convulsions of Israel/Palestine, a first hint that the sacred cedars crowning the hills had also witnessed their share of traumas.  

What struck me about the city of Beirut itself was its wakeful, urbane feel.  Having wandered massive eastern cities – Kolkata, Delhi, Karachi, Dhaka – to us, Beirut was a revelation: holiday frolics on sandy beaches, gleaming ships rocking at anchor in the harbor, Arabic, French, English and German in play around chic downtown hotels.  Slick eateries displayed chicken and lamb turning on spits through sidewalk windows.  Soft-serve ice cream vendors conducted a brisk business in the summer sunshine.  Djellabas and the latest fashions from the runways of Paris and Milan mingled with nonchalance in the shopping districts.  

What we could not have foreseen as visitors, though, was how all of this rested on delicate – and it turns out, fragile – underpinnings.  Soon enough, the handshake understandings between communal leaders that held back political chaos, splintered under the strain of massive shifts of power.  Geo-politics took full possession of the hallways and cloakrooms of decision-making.  The city descended into hell.  Bombs and barricades, ‘greenlines’, corruption, public desperation and further waves of refugees and assassinations carried the day.  Today, not only Beirut, but the entire eastern Mediterranean neighborhood suffers in a maelstrom of conflict.

All the while, the Cedars of God, those groves of sacred trees, gaze down on the fevered plains below, still retaining their native strength and eloquence.  As a sign of the yearning for a peace that inhabits the trees, some have set out to plant seedlings to regenerate those forests that might once again become the envy of surrounding nations.  And not only for their utility in erecting monuments of ambition and power, but for their promise of healing, their beguiling fragrance, their quiet appeal for sanity in the cool shade of understanding.  

Might there come release from the cruel logic of present brutalities if rivals were summoned to make the acquaintance of those cedar groves, to feel the welcome of generational silence, to breathe the fragrance of the ages?  There, on the upper reaches of the Lebanon, the regal cedars still span the millennia having withstood war and greed, folly and neglect, waiting to be noticed.  Waiting to be acknowledged and revered.  Waiting to be heeded.