[Oe List ...] Childermas

[Jaime R Vergara]

Lucille, you might say, we have time to scribble during the holidays!
 
Sharing the following with the listserv, with the usual caveat: if curious, welcome; not, see at the next bend.
 

j'aime la vie



-----Original Message-----
From: lifeline248 <lifeline248 at aol.com>
To: svesjaime <svesjaime at aol.com>
Sent: Fri, Dec 23, 2011 1:05 am
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Jesse Power


 
Childermas, the massacre of innocents
 
In Christian dramaturgy, today marks the massacre of the innocents.  Catholics celebrate it as Innocents’ Day.  It stems from the Gospel of Matthew’s report of King Herod’s infanticide to protect the throne from a possible King as told him by the Three Magi.  
 
The story parallels that of Moses’ birth when the Pharaoh decreed that infants be killed to also protect the throne.  This is not surprising since Matthew’s book is probably the worst embarrassment of biblical literalists.  Some tend to take Gospel accounts these days as those of eyewitnesses writing with NY Times journalistic standards; Matthew is not unlike a country preacher thumbing his Sacred Scripture and choosing passages to support his personal and theological claims.  He meant to present Jesus to faithful Jews, possibly after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and it followed the Talmudic practice of taking Scriptures as words of prophecy that anticipated contemporary events.
 
The wailing of Rachel out of the book of Jeremiah is taken as a point of reference even as the early Church presented Jesus as the second Moses to the followers of the Temple.
 
The Roman tradition beatified the first Christian martyrs of the Church, and enshrined the cult of victimization in the process.
 
San Vitores came prepared, nay, expected to be martyred in Guam.  He welcomed and courted the prospect.  It would be the epitome of his service to his Church and devotion to his Lord.  He was not killed for baptizing infants.  He was done in because there was no scientific metaphor yet to explain why children were dying (European diseases decimated 90 percent of the population) and San Vitores’ Iberian dogmatic desire to make sure that children were properly baptized, ensuring entry to glory, did not appease the non-theistic parents (infidels, we call them) who made the connection that each time a Padre pronounced the triune formula on a child, the child died!  When well-traveled Chinaman Choco abetted the suspicion, San Vitores’ fate was sealed.
 
Marianas’ Christian faithfuls tell the same story, acknowledging Blessed Pedro Calungsod, a 17-yr old from Cebu as a beatified martyr in odium fidei (in hatred of the faith).  T’was not the faith that was hated; the widespread and unexplained dying was!
 
Being on the receiving end of colonial thrusts, we always blame colonials for taking advantage of our innocence, and Childermas comes the closest to elevating through ritual that virtue of being victimized into kingdom come.  The loss of innocence is a metaphor we use to whine over excesses of colonial masters, or protest the exploitation of one’s kind by another who lord it over access to national patrimony and public budgets. 
 
Why, I’ve even heard it used on the CNMI vis-a-vis, the Feds!
 
The illusion of the victim came to me as a jolt in the same fashion as the image of the free lunch was devastatingly decimated by Reagan’s sense of humor.  There is no free lunch as there are no victims.  The illusion of innocence is a failure to acknowledge one’s complicity to the misfortunes in one’s life.  Genetic conditioning comes with our birth, along with memes that transmit accumulated cultural memories.  We are not delivered tabula rasa when we wail our first cry.  We are complicit in the unfolding of our destiny from conception hour one!
 
We might feel that natural causes like typhoons and tsunamis, and mysterious chances like a sudden economic downturn, dominate our lives, leading many to be stoical on the one hand, or superstitious on the other, so when we do not feel ourselves to be magically lucky, we resign as a casualty of victimization.  How convenient!
 
This Childermas, sad as it is even as we know of children around the world suffering from dire poverty, devoid of clean water and adequate nutrition, remote from preventive and remedial health care, and hardly recipients of secure existence subjected to the crazy exigencies of stubborn wars, is in the context of a larger drama of life that winds from womb to the tomb laced with the power of free choice.  None of the world religions are devoid of the freedom side of human existence, the challenge to take one’s circumstances whatever and however they are dealt with, and make fundamental choices of one’s own.  Much of piety in any surviving tradition, save the inward looking practices of those in motion meditation, falls on the pole of dependence on a supreme being, SuperChrist to contemporary Christian piety, rather than relying on the cosmic permission to exercise one’s innate freedom.
 
Even Paul’s injunction that Christ calls all to freedom falls to devotional deft ears that consider praying as altering the chemistry of cancer cells, or, god-help-us, insuring a parking space at the grocery store before one gets there!
 
There is the freedom to alter our circumstances, also, the freedom to decide how to relate to any of our given circumstances, but most importantly, the freedom to create the story that will allow and determine how we journey the rest of our lives. The devil is in the details of the Yuletide story; the angelic views the whole panorama and waves a magical wand from atop a Christmas tree.  The angel’s stance is pretty much my story.  May also be that of the so-called ‘innocents’!





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