WINDHOVER JESUIT MAGAZINE - 4TH QUARTER 2008
EDITORIAL:
Remember the POOR this Christmas
By Frank Savadera, SJ
Who amongst us have had really encounters with the poor? For some of us, helping the poor comes automatic. We give our loose coins to the blind tapping on our car windows when traffic stops. Our unconsumed “Go-big time” softdrinks or packs of French fries, we often share with street kids outside our favorite fast food restaurants. When our schedule permits, we even volunteer our time and resources for feeding programs, medical missions and other socio-civic projects. Given our many and ordinary interactions with the poor, how have we really learned about them? Have we really asked ourselves: How is it really like to be materially poor? To be poor not only today or for a weekend or for a month … but to be materially poor all our lives?
Could it be that God may have really forsaken the poor? We think of such a question as mere rhetorical -- not begging for answers -- for we know that God takes care of his flock. The Lord never forsakes his people! And how do we know for sure? Simply because we know how it is to be poor. More than material poverty, to be poor means being most troubled by a deep sense of helplessness, of not having the power to relieve oneself of the pain and brokenness of one’s current situation. We think of specific moments in our lives when we have been most helpless and perhaps even hopeless. Perhaps indeed -- at single instances in our lives -- we have not been in control of things happening around us. We were at a lost as to how we may proceed with our day. We remember the time when we lost a very precious loved one … a child, a parent or a partner. We may perhaps also remember the agony of losing money to a pick pocket or our house getting robbed, ransacked or worst, burnt to the ground. Remember those uneasy moments of loneliness, of not knowing what to do … not knowing whom to approach … not even determining what to ask for since we have indeed lost our way. Isn’t it true that at least once in our lives, we have experienced a most desolate situation of lack … of having utterly nothing. Isn’t it that even for a fleeting moment … we know exactly what it means to be poor?
We look back at those isolated instances in the past and tell ourselves that God has indeed not forsaken us. The Lord was there and very much present through most spontaneous efforts of people to help -- through a friend’s most assuring words of encouragement or through a neighbor’s quiet yet most consoling and most crucial presence. Isn’t it that we ourselves in the past, felt that we have indeed been helped? We readily accept that through our own efforts alone, we could not have pulled ourselves up from our past states of misery?
Christmas is a time to relive the grace and reality of God not forsaking us. At Christmas, we express our most profound gratitude to the God who is Emmanuel – He who in the poverty of our human situation, still choose to be with us. He makes it possible for grace to abound in the world so that in all things and at all times, having all that we already need … we may abound in the work of helping our neighbor.
We give to the poor precisely because we know what it means to be poor. The help we got from others during the lowest moments in our lives was the Lord’s way of reaching out to us … His way of communicating how He is not forsaking us. Can our expressions of generosity especially this Christmas be our way of insisting that through us, God couldn’t at all be forsaking his people … the poor?
Christmas is a time to remember God’s own self-giving and as well, our capacities to give a little of ourselves to others. We give to those who are most in need this Christmas knowing how our giving becomes our small way of letting God’s presence be made known in the world as we ourselves have experienced it. This Christmas, opportunities to help our poor neighbors abound. Help spread God’s joy and cheer.
