It's December 7. Pearl Harbor Day. The day the US entered the Second World War, dragged into the melee that isolationists had wished to avoid.
December 7 spurred the idea that Americans of Japanese ancestry were a threat. Little children, full-time housewives, 3rd generation American Citizens were assumed to be corruptible, so they were taken from their homes and businesses. Our government seized their property, never to return it. (If this sounds familiar, it had happened before, to the original residents of North America, but with more killing.)
December 7 is a few weeks away from the inauguration of an idiot/imbecile/narcissist/destroyer, who may bring our nation into war. All the economists have stated his policy stances will bring us into a major Recession soon. I despair with how the least, the last, and the lost may be treated.
December 7 is a few weeks away from my mother's birthday...my first one without her. Only a few days after that, is my daughter's birthday, what a wonderful fun time we will have!
December 7 is a few weeks away from the remembrance of the birth of the Christ child. And that birth is what I've been thinking about for a couple of days.
Christ was sent to us as as a baby, born into a working-class family of the conquered society. He was born in a stable, cold and dark. Today, the equivalent would be a garage, I think, or a subway, or a post office.
We don't have records for much of his life, but the tradition holds that at age 30 he went on walkabout, then decided to become a homeless beggar for his preaching tour.
That's right: the Great Change began from a homeless beggar.
Christ has always had a following from the poor. In his life, he valued those who society had discarded. He touched the leper. He allowed the woman with the permanent hemorrhage to touch him. He allowed the community leaders to pose difficult questions, which he answered with a story (and, I think, often with a gleam in his eye!)
He didn't regard any human as more valuable than another. When disciples fought over pecking order, he curtailed that notion. He wept when his friend, Lazarus died, but delayed going to see him in order for the miracle to be verifiable.
I often have difficulty understanding what Christ was thinking during these days. How much did he understand of the divinity within him? How did he discern when to reveal it, and how much of the divinity to reveal? With one, he healed from a distance. With another, he healed with direct touch.
I was listening to an interview with a Jesuit, who noticed that the Beatitudes (Sermon on the Mount, the Blessed is the...poem/song) could be spaced to fit into 140 characters.
Tweeting the words of our Lord can bring both challenge and peace.
Are all my tweets bringing challenge and peace?
I've heard that the job of Ministry is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
But, until we were left with nothing, I really didn't understand how "comfortable" I was!
And on days when we have enough to eat and the bills are paid, I feel myself sliding back to that state of mind, where Items become objects of desire.
At one point, all we owned was locked away from us, held hostage, it seemed. Having little furniture, an air mattress, and only some shoes destroyed my reflection, the image I had tried to maintain of myself.
I'd like to think I could say that I wouldn't trade that experience, for what it taught me. I value the lessons I learned, but it wasn't an easy way. At one point, I sold pieces of jewelry in order to have funds for food. Later, I learned that the church had given us gift cards for the grocery store.
But today, I get to value each person. Today, I get to be surrounded in light. Today, I can choose to be that which I am called to be, the only view of our living Lord that some will see. Oh, that I do not fail in that task!
