Sunday, December 19, 2004
Mercado: The Filipino belen
By Juan L. Mercado
In many offices today, a Filipino belen graces the entrance. Nipa shingles make up the stable’s roof. Coconut palm trees flank entrance to the manager and a suspended star-parol blinks beside the angel figurines. In some Nativity cribs, Joseph and Our Lady are in tropical clothes, heedless of the Palestinian winter.“
The Filipino Belen” was a Christmas Eve address to an American audience by late historian Horacio de la Costa, SJ. Below are excerpts of Fr. de la Costa’s talk. They show there’s far more beyond the obvious surface.
In my country, almost every family has a “belen”, a Bethlehem. Just as here in America, you have a Christmas tree.
Often, it’s just a sandlot or an ordinary table, which at Christmastime, we try to represent to ourselves the birth of our Savior. In the center, we place a Christ Child. And around it we arrange Our Lady and Saint Joseph, the way Catholics everywhere, and in every age, have pictured them.
But the rest of the scene bears very little resemblance to the real Bethlehem, or indeed to anything else you have ever seen.
For we make the stable in which Christ was born a little palm-leaf
house, like those in which most of our people live. The shepherds are there; but they are dressed as farmers and fishermen because we have no sheep. And we have no winters.
And in one corner, the Three Kings are on their way. But they do not ride camels. Rather, one of them leads our town’s patient beast of burden: the carabao. And they look up to the marvelous star – made of paper pasted on a bamboo frame and hung from the ceiling.
You will smile, perhaps, at our simplicity. And it is true, of course, that the history is all wrong. Christ was not born in a palm-leaf shack, and the Wise Men never brought their gifts on the back of a carabao.
It is around this homemade version of the Christmas story, within the circle of light cast by the paper star, that our families in the Philippines kneel to pray on Christmas Eve. .
But I think, that in our ignorance we give expression to a very great truth.
You see, although Christ was born 2,000 years ago in Palestine, He was not born only for that nation and that time. He was born for all time and for all peoples.
He was born for you and for me.
He willed to become a man in order to save all men; and He chose to be born homeless, because He wanted to be everywhere at home. He arranged that there should be no room for Him in an inn, because He wished rather that men and women and children, in every clime and century, should long to shelter Him in their hearts, and hold Him close, on Christmas Day.
For we must not forget that this Child, this little Son of Mary, is also the Son of God. “God of God,” as we say in the Credo of the Mass, “Light of Light; true God of true god; begotten, not made; of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made.”
What are time and space to this immortal Infant? There are for Him no distances. And and He lives in an eternal Now.
And so it is quite right for us to think of Him, not as being born a long time ago and far away, but in our time and our land.
And it is right, profoundly right, that we should surround His cradle with all that is familiar and dear to us - our houses, our tools, our toys, everything that is part of ourselves and our daily lives - because it was to bless and sanctify these, and ourselves with them, that Christ was born.
We come from the ancient East, with our fishing nets and the grain of our ancestral fields; you come from the mighty West with the burnished metal of your forges; we cross the threshold worn smooth by the feet of our fathers.
We kneel together at last before a little Child. His arms are outstretched to receive us; and tough as they are tiny and soft, a baby’s arms, there is room enough in them for all the world.
Only for sin is there no room in them: for mutual suspicion, racial hate, tyranny and unreasoning revolt: all the murderous hate that piled the corpses high at Dunkirk and Dachau.
These we must leave behind us in the outer dark, before we enter the House of Christmas; for here in this abandoned stable, “in this place where Christ was homeless, all men are at home.”
At home: and so, at peace: all men and women together united in one family — the family of Christendom, the family of Man.
Here must be no sound of quarreling, ever, no voices raised in anger or in hate; you see, there is a Child in the House, and He is the Lord of the threshold.
Kneel we together, then, before the Child and His Mother; kneel we together and pray.
We pray for one another, and for all who still sit in darkness and the shadow of death, that they may see His star through the murk of our troubled time, and come from East and West, to enter the House of Christmas, to find therein, as we found, looking deep in baby’s eyes, the peace that the world cannot give.
(December 19, 2004 issue)
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