This year’s season of dark and sacred nights has less stars in the skies or in the air. It can be both real and imagined. Man-made stars that traditionally bathed the season’s glory in soft and colorful glow are fewer in the streets, houses, landmarks and even solitary trees this time.
It’s as if the invisible virus has slipped inside grandpa’s big house and pushed the main switch to dim.
Yet, and yet, there’s so much blinking in the Christmas blur, despite the gloom, for a number of existential reasons: lost of dear ones, jobs or livelihood degradation of dreams , pain, faint hope and risk — humanity reduced to its kernel. It’s a carousel of blues, almost Lent in Yuletide. It’s a gloom with some eschatological quality to it.
If there are more Debbie Downers than Pollyanas, you must concede to their human frailties and aggravations, considering what’s on most everybody’s plate in the moment. The One who was born on Christmas day knew from the start what’t stuff we’re made of.
The rich are different from you and me, Hemmingway told Fitzgerald, in that they only have more money. Revision circa 2020: the virus is the latest leveler. If you prick us, the rich Jew Shylock implored, do we not bleed?
But there are, to be honest, congenital optimists, although far and few between in the mix. They not only see silver lining behind the clouds and the clouds eventually dispersing; they see blessings getting through the dark atmosphere.
Ning Cordero, Punto’s marketing manager, was a wellspring in saying how thankful she is even in the midst of a health crisis that has hurt many sectors, including media — especially the local ones like Punto she’s working hard her butt for. (Never mind the classy French-inspired cleavage insinuation that the semi-blond (authentic) editor Bong Lacson teased her endlessly during a simple but spicy lunch in Clark the other day).
She still has a job, for one, she said. Apparently, among others she’s very grateful for that, on the whole, sums up her meaning of life. “Oh Lord that lends life,” prayed Shakespeare,” lend me a heart replete with gratitude”.
The pandemic Christmas is an existential pause — physically and spiritually, perhaps intellectually — engaging every man’s or woman’s being, regardless of gender, creed or political inclination.
One can pause, like Ning, for gratitude, being thankful for what one has and not what one craves for, especially in as a brutal time as the pandemic. Samgy is irrelevant to the debate. Her point over Korean lunch can embarrass, maybe even shame, a dogmatic religious who preaches gratitude Monday to Saturday and twice on Sunday. Doxology, after all, is not only for singing but for living .
“In a pause,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “I hear a call”. Everyone has a calling, and one,therefore, should pause what the call is all about.
Those who are in public service, a pause can help one reflect on the motive: is it to protect or convey whose more powerful, who calls the shots? Those who have chosen the path to heal people must think if giving service and caring takes precedence over profit, notwithstanding the PHILHEALTH lure.
Those in positions of leadership can step back and see if they walk the talk and not leading others in the wrong and wrongful direction. As I write this , people are outraged at the shooting of a mother and son by a policeman who showed in fatal terms when somebody believes that power begins at the barrel of a gun.
For the too a many problem this country is facing, it is worthwhile to consider President Duterte’s query apropos : who else is sick in the head in goverment, apart from the alleged mentally ill cop?
It could pave the way to a more intelligent, reasonable, humane, let alone Christian, approach to governance and politics that for so a long time has bedevilled the nation.
To be fair to all, it should be from top to bottom. Christmas is as good time as any as we fast- forward 2021 in mind.
Merry Christmas, every one!
