SIFTINGS
A Ransomed Christmas
Firstly, I want to correct a typo in my last column entry: the last part of the last sentence should have read “...held captive for ransom” instead of “held capture for ransom.” Mea culpa due to my eyes’ assuming that the right word had been encoded in that familiar phrase. Serendipitously, this is the right intro for my column for Christmas Day, talking of ransoms.
It seems that we–a third-world nation of politicos, showbiz denizens, middle class do-gooders, intellectual idealists, and a masa majority composed of perennially poor, unemployed, undernourished, unwashed, underpaid, marginalized sectors of Filipino society who constitute a burden to the majority of righteous, law-abiding citizens who in turn dutifully pay their taxes come hell, fire and high water–will always be beset, held for ransom even, by the problems, tragedies, and disasters that seem never-ending. Most especially as the year comes near to its close, we Filipinos in this past decade have been forced to witness, with our mouths agape and eyes bulging in perpetual horror, events and scenes of epic destruction rendered in spectacular, living and livid colors: those sinking ships, mall bombings, road accidents galore, rampaging floods, and the most heinous political crime ever recorded, the Ampatuan massacre. And now, capping the list, a timely display of pyroclastic materials to drive people out of their homes in this season of the birth of Christ, prefiguring to outdo the usual unruly, vulgar Pinoy greeting of the New year in a mix of firecrackers and gunfire and blood.
And afterwards? Being treated to the expected aftermath: bleeding hands, missing fingers; cut lips or worse, emptied eye sockets; faces, arms, chests and backs burned from closest encounters with the latest samples of gunpowder inventions in a celebration spiced up by the human proclivity for alcohol and gun-firing into the night-air which often claim a hapless victim or two, mostly children.
But what the heck! Christmas and the New year come only once a year. It’s goodbye to the old, hello to the new. And beyond that, election time, and we’re on a roll again! What the heck!
But have we forgotten what Christmas is all about? A baby born in a lowly stinky stable, with a manger for a crib? From being the unwitting symbol of Hope for the humble, the downtrodden, the dispossessed, in that Child’s predestined Crucifixion, He in time becomes the symbol of supreme Sacrifice for the Salvation of Humankind, even as His 33 years of existence on earth makes Him the Voice of Wisdom and Infinite Compassion, a rallying symbol for all that the human Heart holds dear, for everything that makes human Life livable.
All is not lost. For there are yet many positive times that make life livable, viable. Last week, members of the Gintong Samahan, an association of retired faculty and staff of the UP Visayas, went caroling at the homes of co-retirees who are no longer able to cope with life: a professor stricken with Alzheimer’s Syndrome; another professor incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease; and still another brought down by a stroke and unable to communicate. All of them confined to their homes in wheelchairs, with their caregivers and families their only links to the outside world. The last we visited is very much up and about, and needed only a little cheering up. He kept saying, “Ka sadya! This is a happy time, ka sadya gid.” Which goes to show how much weight visits of good will and cheer carry in the totality of the human equation.
We sang the usual Christmas carols in our not so special voices, mostly hoarse from age and non-use. We brought for each a basket of pastries and the season’s fruits, almost the same merienda fare they served us! Little enough as gifts, but big in spirit for they came from the pure generosity of our collective and economically-challenged hearts!
For us retirees, this is the truest Christmas possible. Because the meaning of that Child in the manger is Humility and the Largeness of Spirit which Jesus Christ exemplified in His Life on Earth.
For this Christmas, we have to put in cold storage the evil ghosts of our past and the gloomy specters of tomorrow, as in Dickens’ Christmas Carol. The terrors of living. This we have to do, so that our minds and hearts as a people and as a nation can store up enough supply of Love, Forgiveness, Strength and a sense of peace, to enable us to face whatever we need to face in the years ahead.
May this Christmas of 2009 be truly blessed with the Hope that refuses to die, though ransomed it may be by the horrors of day and the terrors of night; and may your New Year be radiant with the Love that spreads over the world from the newborn Child in the Manger.
