Scenes of a memory

Everywhere I look, I see bright lights, red and green decorations, cheerful trees being dressed up to liven the dreary atmosphere of winter. I see children hastening hardly containing the anticipation that colors their cheeks a warm crimson. I try to understand all the hustle and bustle, the noise and wrappings, the warm hugs and kisses, of course the joy from all this activity. Yet I feel so far away from it. You might even call me a Scrooge, saying, "Bah humbug!"

I have never been able to understand Christmas through the tinsel and decorations. It never occurred to me to have a Christmas tree. I was never good at picking presents for friends or relatives. Didn’t even think about sending or getting any Christmas cards. Christmas has always been a mystery to me, a mystery about a simple event yet it is so profound that it has baffled me for so long. I see it as a birth of a child. A birth that happens not in a golden palace or to well known parents. A birth that happens in a sheep shed in the middle of no where to two people who are just an ordinary loving couple who are just trying to find shelter at the end of a long journey.

Yet this is the mystery. How the Child of Light can choose to reveal himself in such shabby surroundings, how the birth of the new hope chose not to show himself in grandeur but instead the private, warm and intimate secrecy inside the loving embrace of a couple named Joseph and Mary. And how should I seek to understand this mystery? Oh, how I wish that I can meet and see this child. To see with my own eyes the warm rosy cheeks of the future hope. Trying in my eager simplicity to hold the tiny hands that will grow to become the hand of the Son Man. The same hands that will be stretched between heaven and earth, nailed to a crucifix, when he gave himself for us in the ultimate revelation of the gift of salvation.

So again this year I will try once more to understand the mystery of the child. Again I will also be away from home (but, do I still have a place I can call home? I’ve been moving so much that I don’t know anymore). A stranger in a strange land as always, even when I’m among my own people.

Yet this is where life has led me. Maybe it is here that I can finally see the mystery of the child. That the child was born, as many are born, far from the glitters that we see people rushing to put up today. A world that not only contains presents, fancy lights and smiling Santa Claus, but also violence, poverty, HIV/AIDS, famine, and more things than you can stuff inside Santa’s bag of goodies. And this is the paradox that is so confusing. In the figure of the child, surely helpless in facing this cold harsh world, yet we see the glimmer of hope. The spirit that continues our journey and say, "There is still a chance for a better world." If only we can see this glimmer of hope behind all the glitter we see today that is certainly not gold.

Maybe I can step closer to understanding the mystery of how the child grew up to become a man who lived the mission and the purpose, who carried the cross for it, to prove the simple yet profound point of "love thy neighbor", going against all the expectations of this materialist world. I hope one day…

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