In Nigeria ’s
Northern State of Gombe, a crowd of excited citizens at a motor park clusters around a bus revving to take them to a
holiday destination for Christmas and New Year celebrations. But a female
Jihadist bomber thinks otherwise. Feigning to be passenger, she sneaks into
their midst and detonates the lethal luggage on her body. She is blown into a
thousand and one pieces. Scores of others suffer the same fate. Those who don’t
die instantly, will die slowly, maimed, scarred and glued to gory memories of
anguish for life. Are they luckier than those who experience prompt dispatch to
the great beyond?
(pix:tvcnews)
Same scene in Bauchi: at the town‘s busy central market, an
explosion rocks the shops and sheds, sparking an inferno that kills many of
those shopping for Christmas and New Year. Health personnel race the wounded
and the dead away in ambulances to medical centers and mortuaries. Global news
agency, Reuters, tells the world
“there are unknown numbers of casualties” in the tragedy.
Dateline: Geidam, Yobe, December 21, 2014, the Yuletide
week. Several people are feared dead and many public buildings torched as
suspected Boko Haram insurgents invade a community. It’s a blind typhoon-like
attack, targeting no one but inflicting death and destruction and disaster on
all.
Besides the dead and those dismembered by these assaults, we
have a great army of grieving family folk, friends loved ones, neighbours and a
large population of internally displaced persons. Among them are those joining
the ranks of orphans, widows and widowers.
But there are other hues of the Christmas blues not heaped
on us by the mad militants of Boko Haram. One is the irreverent conception
that Christmas is the season to spend,
outspend and revel, the period to show
off expensive new apparel, the time to inflict further pain on the poor by
hiking the cost of goods and services. Another is to hold parties that are
veritable platforms for debauchery that mock the Man Whose birth we claim we
are celebrating.
The innocent poor and the underprivileged are unfortunately
lured into such gatherings to spend their meager resources on drinks, drugs and
women, vices that sap them and leave them more alienated from the joy they seek
during the season.
Are the so called affluent who can afford to buy up the
glittering tinsel of Christmas baggage spared its blues? No! They have a
similar pact with mixed fortunes despite a fleeting stay on the laps of
pleasure. At Christmas they set out on a journey armed with much trust in the
power of their wealth to bring them joy. But alas, they don’t get it! True joy
isn’t a product of bribing a season’s indulgency in hedonism. So they end up
frustrated in not getting what they desired. Their money disappoints them and
they end unfulfilled. In other words, despite all the razzmatazz Christmas and
New Year season throws up, they don’t get the satisfaction they seek. They end
up with what has been described as “an unfinished business”.
According to the 19th
Century American philosopher and psychologist, William James, “There is nothing
so fatiguing as an uncompleted task.” When all we do at Christmas is to spend
and overeat and overdrink and flaunt our wealth in the midst of poverty and in
the face of those who do not have rather than shedding the weight of wealth by
sharing with the needy, we can’t but finish up grieving at Yuletide in addition
to the anguish unleashed on us by Boko Haram and other criminal gangs we have
created by our unjust social system.
Let us also make it clear that while we make ourselves sad
at Xmas through our excesses we are also causing pain to the Soul of our Lord
Jesus Christ. We say we are honoring Him in remembering His advent to the world
to save fallen man. This can’t be so. How can we adore or pay homage to a Holy
Personage through the unholy acts we perpetrate at Xmas? How do you celebrate
Jesus, the Friend of the poor, when a greater number of His friends fare even
worse on so-called His Birthday than at other times? We give His loved ones
crumbs at Yuletide. We make Him grieve when the poor, those He associates with,
are denied the earth’s goodies because the rich, powerful and influential have
cornered all the resources of the society.
This avaricious spirit is contrary to the purpose of God as revealed in the Bible: “…the profit (the wealth, the resources, the supplies, the riches) of the earth is for all: the king himself is served by the field.” (Ecclesiastes 5:9).
The church in our day hasn’t helped matters. It isn’t
forcefully and sincerely preaching a message that would make the rich reduce
its carnal weight of wealth to balance the socio-economic equation. So although
the two classes are in the church physically on meeting days, their souls are
poles apart, both scheming with two eyes opened at prayer time and in bed away
from the temple premises.
Do we revere the Name of the Lord and what He stands for,
with this attitude whether at Christmas at any other time? Of course not!
Rather, we crucify Him the second time as we claim to celebrate His Birth our
wanton festivities.
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*Ojewale, a journalist at Onibuku, Ota, Ogun State, is a contributor to SCRUPLES. He could be reached with: bmrtbo@yahoo.com
*Ojewale, a journalist at Onibuku, Ota, Ogun State, is a contributor to SCRUPLES. He could be reached with: bmrtbo@yahoo.com
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