Lost simplicity

Globalisation has brought with it an ever-widening chasm between the rich and the poor. In the context of this reality, excessive consumerism, as displayed during the Christmas season, is a blatant disregard of the values taught by Christianity. T. R. JOY writes on the need to rethink our responsibility towards the underprivileged.

CHRISTMAS in the world today has become one of the few international mega festivals. Christmas is the time, especially for the first world, to spend billions of dollars eating and drinking, shopping and partying evermore lavishly. This time, as the first Christmas of the new millennium, the global business parasites saw to it that Christmas spending rose to the peak. A few years ago, there were reports of TV channels using even pornography for Christmas sales promotion.

Despite such extravagant market euphoria for December 25 as the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, there are Christian denominations and sects that observe it on different dates. The Armenian Church and the Church of the East in Trissur, Kerala, for instance, celebrate Christmas on January 6. Many have posited the theory that the feast of Christ's nativity was instituted in Rome or possibly in North Africa as a Christian rival to the non- Christian festival of the sun god at the winter solstice. December 25 historically was also the birthday of the Iranian god Mithra venerated as the sun of righteousness.

As we know, the conversion of Emperor Constantine in AD 312 established Christianity as the official religion of the empire. With the royal sanction, the commemoration of Christ's birth acquired prominence in the Roman calendar. According to one Roman almanac, the Church in Rome commemorated Christmas by the year 336. But, the eastern churches did not observe it in the early centuries of Christianity. And, the exact circumstances of the beginning of the Christmas Day remain obscure.

How strange and ironic it is that we have a Christmas budget for billions of dollars to honour the supposed birthday of the One whose parents, as the legend goes, could not manage a decent place for his birth and had to make do with a cowshed. Jesus is believed to have led a simple lifestyle and insisted on the true Christian religious responsibility of committed engagement for truth, justice and compassion to all, specially to the underprivileged and the marginalised. Worse, the irony looks farcical when the ambiguity surrounding the nativity myth is almost always overlooked, and normally forgotten.

The central events of the Christian faith and spirituality are Jesus Christ's self sacrifice upon the cross and the eventual Christian trust in His resurrection. But, the nativity myths, which are a later addition to the Bible and to Christmas - which is a still later Christian invention - have turned out to be the grandest of Christian feasts. Cannot we smell a global conspiracy, probably by the people who have a stake in consumerism and market? They could not have made such big bucks sponsoring a Good Friday, an event more central to Christian vocation and religious practice.

Restraint in consumption and generosity to the less privileged in society have been recognised and recommended as a virtue in many religions throughout the ages. Socially responsible consumption and rigorous practice of social justice should be all the more so in Christian worldview and everyday living. Otherwise, as Dr. Aloysius Pieris, a Jesuit theologian and priest from Sri Lanka put it, Christianity would be creating and perpetuating a "leisure class" through prayer centres and ashrams that attract mostly the rich to short spells of mental tranquillity rather than a life of simplicity and spirituality. Responsible Christian spirituality is not the doctrinal conclusion of a theology. It should evolve from the radical involvement with and support for the poor and the oppressed.

Maurice F. Strong, chairman of the Earth Council and president of the UN University for Peace, observes in his article in The Hindu Survey of the Environment 2000: "if everyone in the world were to adopt the current consumption patterns of the rich countries, an extra three planets like Earth would be required to support them." Another authority on our environment and our common future, Dr. Gro Brundtland, Director General of WHO, has this report at the end of 1999: "Since Rio, the number of people living in absolute poverty has increased. Today, some 1300 million people live on less than a dollar a day. At U.S. two a day, the number rises to half of the world population - to three billion fellow human beings." Even in this country, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening alarmingly.

In the context of this dire reality of our contemporary world and society, Christian perspectives on Christmas should be reconsidered and radically revised with authentic Christian significance and proactive charge. Otherwise, Christmas will continue to slide into a global commercial soap opera, cleverly stage-managed like beauty pageants and international trade festivals, profit as their prime deity. Then, the Christian religious conscience and the Christian elite will be guilty of their unholy and irreligious alliance with global parasites feeding on the poor around them. The Bible is categorical in its commandment: "No one can serve two masters... God and Mammon." (Matthew 6:24).

The author is a lecturer in English and a literary critic.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Where's the reason for the season?
Next     : Plastic patriotism