Good tidings




As part of the homily, the priest at church today asked the community: If Jesus Christ were to be born today in Makati, where exactly would He be born?

Then he went around soliciting responses. Someone answered OSMAK, which is what Ospital ng Makati is called. Someone else said Makati Med. A third said The Peninsula. Obviously, the priest was not getting the answer he wanted so he continued to solicit more answers...

Finally, he blurted: Of course he would still choose to be born with the poor!!! And then he enumerated the possible modern-day versions of the stable - a shanty in a squatter's colony, in a makeshift house under a bridge, perhaps in a sidewalk.

I didn't quite agree with what the priest said, but Catholic masses are not exactly platforms of democracy so of course I kept my ideas to myself.

But the news was on when I got home and there it was: Reasons why I think Jesus might not have to be born in squalid conditions today. On the news were stories of people reaching out to others, specially the poor. There was this news story about a man who went around hospitals to give financial assistance to families; he did so anonymously. There were other stories of families driving around distributing groceries, food, toys to the poor. There was also this jeepney driver who witnessed a hold-up incident in another jeepney and decided to follow the holduppers -as a result, the criminals were caught. There were other stories of a similar nature.

There are many stories like these that happen everyday. Unfortunately, they don't get featured in the news because...well, they are not sensational and controversial. But because it is Christmas today, our news programs were mostly about things positive.
Nativity photo courtesy of Freefoto.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open Letter To Our Leaders

Dear Tita Cory, Senators, Congressmen, Businessmen, Media people, Leftists, and all Bleeding Hearts Out There: I am angry. And I know that there are many out there who are angrier than I am for the same reason. And that reason is simple. I am sick and tired of all you guys claiming to speak for me and many Filipinos. I feel like screaming every time you mouth words about fighting for my freedom and my rights, when you obviously are just thinking about yours. You tell me that the essence of democracy is providing every citizen the right to speak his or her mind and make his or her own informed judgments, but you yourselves do not respect my silence and the choices I and many others have made. In other words, your concept of democracy is limited to having your rights and your freedoms respected, at the expense of ours. I am utterly flabbergasted that you still do not get it: we already responded to your calls, and our response has been very clear - we chose not to heed your calls to go t
Read more

Farewell, Victor

Image
This is my column today. Renato Victor Ebarle Jr. was at the prime of his life; barely 27 years old and just starting to build his career in human resource management. At the time of his death, he was recruitment manager of the Hotel Peninsula Manila. To say that he still had the whole world ahead of him sounds like a cliché but those among us who actually knew him, those among us who were aware of the kind of passion he had for life and for his work, people like me who had the privilege of having been consulted by him on many professional matters, know this with a certain degree of certainty. I was Victor’s professor in three major subjects when he was in college. In each one of them, he sat at the first row, which said a lot about the kind of person he was. Professors know this for a fact: Bullies don’t sit in front of the class where they cannot annoy anyone. I was his thesis adviser and he and his team spent a whole academic school year trying to break new grounds on the question o
Read more

How That Letter Came To Be...

I had some time in my hands last night. I bloghopped. For the very first time I got to read in detail what people are saying about that letter and about me in other blogs. I have already responded to most of the comments in this blog. However, I cannot possibly answer all comments given that I have only ten fingers and there are only 24 hours in a day. It is very tempting, but this blog is not my life and contrary to the overactive imagination of some people, I do not have the resources to do that. I cannot possibly monitor the thousands of blogs out there. Besides, the comments in this and other blogs (and even in the newspapers) do tend to answer each other, and I do not fancy myself as an ultimate arbiter or judge with the final and definitive opinion (I do not think anyone is qualified to do that unless that person died on a cross and resurrected in three days), so there is really not much to say after reading the various pros and cons. Some people do a better job at it anyway. I d
Read more