I’d like to sincerely wish one and all a very merry Christmas, but how can I? I’m ending the year as I began it recognizing the utter vanity of tradition if we are not prepared to protect and preserve it.
As far as Christmas is concerned, I’ve long repudiated the Johnny Mathis and Bing Crosby sentiments which have come to characterize the season for generations mesmerized in shopping malls by the symbols and music of a perverse religion of a perverse civilization outrageously and brazenly called ‘Christian’, whose civic leaders have co-opted the Christian narrative as cover for their imperial impulses for centuries:
- In Jesus’ name they murdered Hypatia in the streets of Alexandria and burned the library there to the ground;
- In Jesus’ name they slaughtered the elderly and innocent, raping mothers and murdering babies in Jewish ghettos right across Europe for centuries;
- In Jesus’ name they plundered and looted their way across continents; friars, monks and soldiers side by side destroying and corrupting civilization after civilization with rapacious, genocidal fervour as the requisite for planting their cross;
- In Jesus’ name kings appropriated the right to do as they please, establishing churches as commemoration of their lasciviousness;
- In Jesus’ name they abominated human dignity in multiplied mass acts of depravity with the unspeakable atrocities of chattel slavery amongst the number of their other unrepented and unrepaired egregious transgressions;
- and so now that they use Jesus’ name to evangelize their gospel of Burger King and KFC to the nations, using mangers and crosses and hymns unto Santa Claus, you expect me, still grieving Hypatia, to bow?
Is their any true basis this depraved culture can claim for identifying with the birth and death of Christ? What do they know of the pristine pastoral innocence of his beginnings or the public flogging, humiliation, torture and crucifixion that marked his death?
This morning as I contemplate the meaning of Christmas, my reflection of Christ comes from the peasant people of Haiti, who well understand both.
I have been wondering since August, how such a proud and strong people, who in 1994 had risen to stand in such unified determination could have been reduced in under a generation (just 30 years later) to the people being described by Mr Golding as a nation on the verge of utter collapse.
“Nobody in Haiti can agree that the sun rises in the east.”
“How do you expect democracy to work when a country has 220 registered political parties, whose only policy is never, never, ever to agree on anything at any time for any reason?” he asked … and I have found no defensible answer till now, though I have ideas, none can be proven.
I try as best I can to be free from bitterness and prejudice. But when I smell a rat, I will sniff its phantasmic odour till its stinking carcass is found.
YeKengalé 