A Note From Paul: The following is an essay from Our Good Friend Silvia Brandon Pérez. Please feel free to post your comments here and I’ll be sure to share them with her. I’m sure she would appreciate any thoughts you may have regarding her words. In the meantime, please enjoy “Revolution as the true spirit of Christmas.”
Christmas, navidad, natividad, the nativity, the birth of a powerful and holy being. You do not have to be Christian to acknowledge that the Jesus whose birth Christians celebrate at this time of year was a powerful and holy being, one who worked throughout his short life to ‘revolutionize’ the times, worlds without end. He came to enforce perennial principles, such as truth and love and beauty and yes, peace. As any revolutionary, he threatened the status quo, threatened the ‘business as usual’ of the time, because with his every word, he demanded a fundamental change, not in perennial principles but in the way they are conceived, understood, acted upon. For this, as with so many others who threaten ‘business as usual,’ he was imprisoned, tortured, and horribly put to death. Shades of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Often the simple way of seeing things is truly the best way. Then as now, the custom was to use simple words but to paint and clothe them in different fashions, what we call today, the spin or framing of issues. Thus, you could take a word such as peace and wage war ‘for’ peace. You could say that all men are created equal and then use that lofty principle to ensure unequal treatment based on race, nationality, gender, or even sexual preference. In the name of universal love, you could spread hatred far and wide.
The concepts were there, as Plato saw them, lofty and supreme, but it is what was done and what continues to be done with them that Jesus wanted to change; he wanted to ‘revolvere’ which is the Latin for revolve from which the term revolution issues; to turn something on its axis and bring it back to the starting point. He called for a change in paradigm, meaning, a fundamental change in how something is seen or visualized.
As I write this on December 23rd in the year 2006, millions go about shopping for gifts that they may celebrate a holy day honoring the birth of a man who was born in poverty and spent most of his life preaching with no recognition, no congressional seat, no official status or university doctoral dissertations. Millions more will die today and tomorrow and on Christmas day and on the day after that, including many new born babes, because they will lack the wherewithal to sustain life while others will exchange frequently meaningless gifts and engage in an orgy of food and celebration. In the US, some will jeopardize their continued existence, mortgage payments, health, in the frenzy to have a “merry Christmas.”
For all who want truth, peace, love and justice for all, let us consider the spirit of this man of Galilee and what it is that he spoke about, what he represented. We have pallid representations of the things he said, for they were taken down by human messengers and translated, and things are frequently lost in translation, but we can glean even from the imperfect renderings the true message.
In one of his most famous speeches, which has become known as the Sermon on the Mount, he blesses those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled, and those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. He blesses the merciful who shall obtain mercy and the peacemakers who shall be called sons and daughters of God.
We are living in dire times, when more than ever we need the strength to seek righteousness, mercy, and peace. A time when, lacking leaders who stand firm on principles, we must be our own leaders. Jesus said that he had come to fulfill the law, eternal law, that which cannot be clothed or framed or disguised. It is time that we demand that the law, without spin or framing, be fulfilled to its last jot and title. That we demand an end to death, and torture, to war and the profiteering from war, to poverty in all its guises, and that we seek to secure the just punishment of all those who have broken the law. That we ask, as he asked, for true revolution. For only then may we be called the children of Spirit.
A thoughtful and revolutionary holiday to each and all of you, my brethren.
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