A Christmas Countdown | Word and Songs
with Sr. Amelyne Paglinawan, fsp
Christmas is a season where everyone says to be jolly yet always falls victim to follies. Celebrations, reunions, festivities, and love are among the themes that float around universally once the season comes around almost universally. However, for this particular episode, let’s delve in further with its significance, faith, and how they intertwine with our existence and perception of the world around us.
We live in a world that constantly pushes us to break our bones, especially in the country that we live in. Yearly, the holiday festivities are the only reprieve Filipinos get upon layers and layers of misery. Yet, still, here we are, choosing pain and suffering as passed on by the elders; romanticizing the blood, sweat, and tears we let out for a semblance of normalcy and achievement.
Once the body is battered, the mind shall be muddled, the heart numbed, and ignorance becomes a strength. Connection with the divine through our inner temples becomes sparse; the majority of us become nothing but impressionable minds that are waiting to be filled with the highly curated reality a few schemed it to be.
Christmas is a gentle reminder of the new covenant, the birth of Christ, and the compassionate world we are now entitled to live in, yet it was warped into something far from that. Just like all festivities – religious and otherwise, in the Filipino household, Christmas became an arena for greed, pride, and self-serving ideals. The noises of the industrialized metro drown out the yearnings of the genuine soul.
There is a tendency to cling onto the loudest of voices, the loudest of noises, that it is easy to get carried away when the enticement of evil appears, masking under the guise of sweet scriptures, it is easy to choose the ease it offers. When gullibility and pride combine, freedom becomes slavery. By then, freeing one’s self becomes tedious, too far-fetched, and downright exhausting. Still, we continue choosing it, for it is easy, loud, obvious, and familiar. Amidst a city of muck, murkier waters are the obvious and easiest choice. More often than not, we are offered an opportunity towards liberty, yet with the fog clouding our hearts, it is usually a chore finding that option.