Last month we facilitated a leadership workshop for a group of public high school students. We have been doing these kinds of workshops for several years now for financially-challenged students so the job was not very difficult. The more challenging part came when the facilitators were given an extra task: to help the students reflect on the coming Christmas season.
This extra task should have been easy except that most of the students came from poor families who have just recently suffered the wrath of typhoon Ondoy. Most of them have had their houses and property flooded and destroyed, the few material things they own, including their school books, notebooks and bags, inevitably lost. How many of them have had to go through the horrendous experience of seeing the waters rushing in, quickly swallowing their houses as they move up to their roof, cold, wet and very afraid, for themselves and their loved ones.
Most of them had not fully recovered from the typhoon and the flooding, the horror-filled experience still fresh in their minds and hearts. Who was I then to talk about the joys of Christmas, one who has been fortunate enough to not go through the same trials as them?
So nervously I asked the students what they were hopeful and grateful for with the coming of Christmas. Most of them said they were grateful that although they’ve lost so much, they still had their families and friends. Some said they were grateful for the people who’ve helped them in their time of great need. Their resilience, the ability to be grateful and find grace amidst their loss, is truly amazing.
But what’s even more amazing is what many of them said they hoped for. You’d think that for people who have lost so much, they’d hope for gifts, for new school supplies, for food on the table, for new appliances, for a roof on their heads. I myself might have asked for a new laptop, shallow as I am. But this wasn’t what had happened. Most of the students said, some with heads bowed and voices low, had hoped to be able to help their families by studying hard and finishing their education. Most of them hoped to be able to serve one day, to give back to those who have been there for them in difficult times.
We ended the session realizing a couple of things. One, that this Christmas we should be grateful for every little act of kindness, small gestures that are expressions of a great love. After all Christ gave us the greatest act of kindness and love by coming to live with us and die for us.
Yet we must not end here. We must also realize that in as much as we have been recipients of kindness, we also have a great capacity to give kindness, no matter what or how much we have lost. We are never too poor or down trodden to give and love.
It has certainly been a very tiring 2009 with a rush of one tragedy after another – typhoon Ondoy and Peping, earthquakes, the Mayon volcano eruption, the Maguindanao massacre, the death of Cory Aquino, and the countless acts of impunity against the people by certain leaders. Add to this our own personal disasters and the Star of Bethlehem doesn’t seem to shine as brightly as it did 2,000 years ago.
But if we look carefully into the folds and shadows of 2009, we are sure to find small yet bright acts of kindness that can overcome any tragedy, that can move the spirit to believe in hope, that make us feel grateful despite everything that’s happened to us. And if we look even more closely we might see that many times these acts of kindness come from those who have suffered more than us, those who seem weaker and lonelier than we could ever be. In their able and generous hands, hope shines the brightest.
And if this is so, then we will know that one of the greatest gifts of Christmas, of Christ’s solidarity with our world, is ultimately our immense and infinite capacity for love and service, the capacity to be the star that brings hope and comfort to the tired and hopeless hearts of men.
In the past year I have been very blest to have come across so many peoplewho have given me the strength to hope once more through their small and great acts of kindness. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I wish I could thank all of you personally; but I can only be so blest. But know that I am incessantly praying for you to find joy, to find love and to find Him in everything and everyone, in all things good and bad, in everything dark and light.
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