Making Christmas relevant to a suffering people

How do you celebrate Christmas when you are faced with abject poverty and widespread illness, crowned by the devastating toll of HIV/AIDS? Joe Komakoma writes in the National Cathnolic Reporter…

LUSAKA, Zambia — For the millions of Zambians, there is very little to cheer about when Christmas comes. Life is one long Advent that they spend preparing, fighting and waiting for a better tomorrow.

How do you celebrate Christmas when you are faced with abject poverty and widespread illness, crowned by the devastating toll of HIV/AIDS?

In the past 10 years, we have faced this dilemma of preaching the Good News of Christmas to more than 8 million, out of the total population of 10 million, of our people who continue to live on $1 a day. We only have half a million people in formal jobs. There is an estimated 2 million people living with HIV; a quarter of a million, among all those, have full-blown AIDS. When you bury close to 100 people each day, death, not so strangely, becomes as natural as going to the supermarket. Government hospitals still lack basic drugs to give to poor people who cannot afford the readily available but expensive drugs in private hospitals, clinics and drug stores.

To make it worse, while there are all these human tragic stories, a privileged few still flaunt their wealth in the faces of the suffering majority. These are the ones who, when Christmastime comes, want to shop until they drop! They couldn’t care less about how much they spend. But while they do that, the majority cannot even afford to buy a Christmas card. It would mean missing a meal if they did.

What, then, should we hold up as the meaning of Christmas when there is so much pain and suffering? Where does that leave a priest? What message does you preach in this context? The natural thing to do is to go back to the event that gave us Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ.

For the rest of this story which is in the current issue visit http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/globalpers