The Nativity amidst calamities

We are on the second week of Advent and Christmas is only twelve days away, but the joy of the season seems to elude many of us. Yes, most of us Cebuanos have been spared the wrath of Yolanda and the terrifying tremor of that 7.2-magnitude quake. But knowing the tragic fate of our brothers and sisters in Bohol, Eastern Visayas, and northern Cebu, our hearts seem unresponsive to the call of light--heartedness and gaiety attendant to the season.

Conspicuous consumption most of us have decided to do without. And our gift giving is certain to swerve towards frugality because much of our resources have been given out to the victims of calamities. But we know that it is not enough to just give. Our hearts have to be with our gifts, for a gift without the giver, to paraphrase a poet, is bare.

That's why it's hard to feel completely joyful as we await the birth of our Lord. As long as the spirit of pain and sorrow afflicts the more than four million people in the disaster areas, no Christian can afford the luxury of feeling really happy this Christmas. No man is an island, remember?

Yet reflecting about it, perhaps, this state of being is what God really wants us to assume in this season of his coming. Perhaps, right from the start he wanted us to fall into the mood of sobriety and solemnity as we recall the mystery of his nativity.

Look at his choice of parents: A lowly carpenter for a foster--father, an unknown village girl for a mother. And where did he choose to be born? Not in a palatial house but in a poor man's barn where of course there was no bed at all but a cow's feeding trough for the heavenly babe to rest in. Such abject poverty was surely not accidental but divinely ordained for the Son of God came to bring good news to men, and the first of that news was the sanctity of poverty. Not that God wants his children to be poor, destitute and hungry. His birds feed in abundance, he clothes the flowers in majesty. How much more for you, says Jesus, who have been fashioned in your Father's likeness?

Poverty, however, is still the message of Christmas-poverty in spirit, that is. For the poor in spirit are humble in spirit. They don't strut around like the Pharisees with their assumed smugness of propriety and holier-than-thou stanch. They don't take the front seat but the last, knowing that in the final reckoning of things, the last could be the first, and the first last.

The proud of course always want the front seat. Forgetting that everything they have comes from God, they think the world owes them accolade and acclaim. Where's the Nativity's lesson of humility? Alas, it has been long blown away by the Yolandas of godlessness and greed. How then can its message of humility, goodness and salvations be internalized?

Except for a few, such internalization is not happening even among baptized Christians. Look at those involved in scams and corruption, are not most of them church--going Christians? Look at the big time tax evaders; don't they profess to be docile parishioners? And look at our church leaders themselves, are they not busily engaged in building what Pope Francis calls an "inclusive" church?

Those twin calamities had indeed caused so many sufferings. Death and destruction were the scourge and not a few of us have asked: Why God? Yet our faith teaches us that God is never a vengeful God. He is all mercy and his banner is compassion. Abundance is promised when he said that he came to give us life and have it abundantly.

Thinking of these and the tragic fate of many of our countrymen, we cannot afford the luxury of consummate joy this season, yet we cannot afford to lose hope because hope, along with love and peace, is also the message of the Nativity of our Lord.