When babies cry

Christmas is a victim of its own sentimentality – a young mother and father, baby, shepherds, animals, magi, stars, a stable and crib. Whether all of this is biblical or not it evokes emotion but also sentimentality. The sentimentality is driven by the commercial success of this Christian feast.

There is a good side to the commercial success for it is indeed a season of “goodwill”. Hampers are given out to the needy in abundance, parties are hosted for children’s homes made possible by generous benefactors, the harshness of daily life is softened by public creches strategically placed, and there is a general feeling of joy, goodwill and thanksgiving.

What we often forget is that Christmas is a “light” feast and is superseded by the greater “light” feast of Easter. But Easter is less commercially exploitable. We have the horrible scene of a man maligned, rejected and crucified who it is said rose from the dead three days day after with a glorified body. Physics is still trying to decipher what Christian faith confidently proclaims.

Not much commercial success, so we bring in the Easter Bunny and butterflies emerging out of cocoons which have practically nothing to do with Easter. The joy and glory of Easter is anticipated by some rather macabre and despairing events.

Yet that is where Christian faith is located. It is located in the victory of Easter not in the sentimentality of a “nice little popo”. That popo becomes a man and then trouble starts. He is a sign of contradiction from the beginning of his public ministry and intimidated Herod who was intent on murdering him when he was a baby because he was a threat to his throne.

Even though of kingly line he was not born a king, in kingly robes and residence. He chose the side of peasants, the marginalised and the powerless. As a young itinerant preacher and prophet he gave the wife of Pontius Pilate nightmares and scared temple priests felt the rug of power pulled from under their feet.

His inaugural speech in the synagogue in Nazarath was subversive. He claimed to have the Lord’s Spirit, to be on the side of the poor, to look forward to the toppling of the powerful and the ascendency of the lowly. And Pilate became particularly uneasy as this peasant king entered Jerusalem victoriously not on a horse but on a donkey.

The bible hints he was born in the night – the shepherd were at their flocks “in the night” and the magi followed “a star”. If we want to find that Infant Babe today we have to look into the night, the night of Trinidad and Tobago. If Christmas doesn’t speak to the night we have lost contact with its deepest meaning.

What are some of the messages that the Infant Babe gurgles that the Spirit helps us translate? One salient message is that all babies are important – “All babies are icons of me,” Jesus would say. It was highly commendable therefore of hospital medical staff to take on the extra load in the maternity wards occasioned by many pregnant migrant women as well as the government’s eventual capitulation to the education of migrant children subject to certain conditions.

Another concern would be children’s homes – state and religious. An eminent local reporter wrote in a Facebook post about a year ago that many of the children’s homes that were under investigation ironically bore the names of saints. The nation was rightly angry at reports of abuse that appeared in the media, especially social media.

The “rights of the child” is a relatively recent item on the moral agenda despite the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child is 100 years old. Laws are promulgated but they often take decades before there is robust enforcement as we see slowly developing in the Caribbean.

That Infant Babe would also say something about the salary increases proposed by the Salaries Review Commission (SRC) for a range of senior public officials up to as high at 47.5%, this at a time when public servants can barely get a 4% increase in salary.

That Babe is saying: “I small. What about small people?” Is there an SRC for fast-food workers, janitors, store clerks and like people? MIT economics professor Abhijit Banerjee in a talk at Seoul National University said data show the beginning of a sharp rise in the disparity between rich and poor when Reaganomics and Thatchernomics resulted in excessively paid CEOs compared with the struggling wages of the run-of-the mill workers. The trend has gotten out of control he asserts.

Aren’t we adding to that scenario here? Babies are not dumb. They cry out fiercely when they are hungry, sick or uncomfortable. We must listen to their cries and act compassionately. They are the voices providing light in the midst of a darkness the darkness does not overpower (Jn 1:5).

The author is the RC Cathedral Administrator Port of Spain