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Thursday, December 23, 2004
Editorials: Sharing the yuletide spirit
At no other time of the year is the heart and hope of the Christian faithful turned towards a common distant place than on the day the Christ Child was born.
It is a moment of great joy for all who believe in Jesus—the one whom God allowed to be born among men to redeem the frail-hearted humanity from the burden of sin.
In return for such redemption, Jesus Christ, in his short existence among men, taught those who believed in him the beauty of love, of sharing love, and the need for man to love another.
This is what Christmas should mean to all of mankind, the sharing of love as symbolized through the gifts we give and receive during the season.
The other day, an elementary school boy bought P5 worth of cookies from the neighborhood store. He gift-wrapped and brought these to school as his “exchanging gift” offering. In exchange, he received a toothbrush and toothpaste, more than the value of the gift he bought.
But that is really the true spirit of Christmas. It is not what you give or what you receive but the gesture of and the spirit in giving.
There is, in Yule, a kind of leveling of the “social” playing field, where the rich and the poor stand toe-to-toe on equal grounds, in the spirit of sharing.
Ironically, the flow of giving is in most part horizontal rather than vertical. Only in few instances is it vertical, that is, from the affluent to the poor—like the distribution of “bundles of joy” that civic clubs and business establishments undertake.
And sharing merely skims the surface. With more than 40 percent of the 84 million Filipinos living below the poverty line, the spread of Christmas joy, indeed, is unrealistically limited.
Unfortunately, it is the material need of the horizontal sharing of the yuletide “spirit” among the poor and needy that impelled many heads of family to commit crime. If anything, the Christmas season could be behind the upsurge of criminality in the city.
Still, regardless of how one acquires and shares his or her material blessings to another human, the fact remains that the gesture is in keeping with our Christian faith.
Movie hero and typhoon victims
Life, indeed, despite its being a shared reality among human beings, is still characterized by the social distinctions that invariably follow people to their graves.
Yesterday, the action star hero known to his fans as FPJ was buried with obvious pomp. But only a few days ago, more than a hundred men and women in the far north, victims of two killer typhoons that hit Luzon, were buried, some in common graves with relatives and friends unable to bid them farewell.
Indeed, it could be a sad commentary of the fickleness of the nation’s media that upon FPJ’s death, the campaign for material support of the hapless typhoon victims was abandoned in favor of the popular movie hero.
(December 23, 2004 issue)
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