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Friday, March 29, 2024

We must find Bethlehem again!

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The days of Cesar Augustus were supposed to have been days of peace.  World history records Octavian’s reign as the Pax Augusta. The Christmas Proclamation—the liturgical oration announcing the birth of the Lord—recites: anno Imperiii Augusti Octaviani, quadragesimo secundo, toto Orbe in pace composito…In the 42nd year of the reign of Octavian Augustus, the whole world being in peace…

But that was how the overlords looked at things.  They had subdued the world. And the blood-stained transition from the days of the Republic to the Principate phase of the Empire was now behind them.  But, really, all was not well.  The Zealots were plotting rebellion, creating mayhem whenever they could, and an irascible and dangerously suspicious Idumean was seated on the throne of the King of the Jews, a puppet perhaps but wielding tremendous powers with the temper of a brat.  Of course, this was a corner of the Roman Empire that really did not matter that much, except when things got out of hand.  And in a still more hidden corner of this nondescript fringe of the dominion, something was happening in an animal shelter that was to change the world.  It has happened many times that changes that have reshaped human history started from the fringes.  What happened at Bethlehem made destiny of eternity, not wishful thinking—and Bethlehem was really nowhere on the map of the significant!

Neither is everything well with us.  There are just too many issues that do not only divide us but that threaten to be our undoing us a nation. And the unpredictability and irascibility of those who lead us is not helping at all.  It is becoming multiply difficult to tell the difference between reliable news and items spun by trolls and paid hacks.  One casts furtive glances in the direction of the military, while conflicting statements about the government position towards the Left swings wildly from warm (almost sizzling!) to cool, if not chilly!  There are even announcements of a new kind of allegiance: belief in God and the combatant repudiation of the church.  “It is enough that one believes in God.  It is not necessary to be part of a hypocritical church,” thus goes the new credo. High up the ladder of power where the air is rarefied and it becomes so easy to confuse fact with fantasy, the world might look like it is at peace.  Down below, one hears the rumbling of discontent, muffled perhaps but, for precisely that reason, more dangerous and insidious.

We need to find Bethlehem again: that spot on earth on which heaven came down.  It has not vanished, but we have lost our way, because we have chosen the company of rulers and kings and taken up our places in the corridors of power.  We have allowed ourselves to be caught in the snares of power-games and power-plays.  But somewhere, out in the fringes of significance, God made us know that it was really not that bad with us, that he had not given up on us, that there was, in all of us, a spark of divinity.  He took unto himself what we all are.  A woman gave birth to God, in an event that will be perpetual absurdity to those who do not believe but will be, for those of faith, the most sublime expression of love and of the worth of the human person!

True, when the holidays shall have passed, the vexing, trying, divisive issues will be there: Tokhang and the alarming body count, EJKs and the protests of human rights advocates, politics, politicians, their schemes and their machinations, the death penalty and the brutality with which some would want it inflicted.  But if we find Bethlehem and we look at the Manger to which the world’s attention has been drawn by the choir of angels, we will behold ourselves—more accurately, the beauty, divinity, holiness and innocence to which we are summoned, into which we are configured and that is promised us as our future.  For the child that lay in the manger was, as the Creed professes Deum verum de Deo vero…true God from true God, fully among us…and “homo factus est”…made man!

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2017 need not find us wallowing in the same mire and filth that have smeared us and made us ashamed even of ourselves, but we must find Bethlehem, and it will not be politicians and their boasts or power or influence who will lead us but shepherds, they who live and flourish at society’s fringes, in the periphery of the decent!

rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph

rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph

rannie_aquino@outlook.com

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