Belated Christmas Reflections

Heaven on earth, we need it now...This season of peace, joy and good will is starting to grate on me, slowly decaying my sense of sugar-coated inevitability. As I was cutting up fruit for Christmas lunch on the morning of the 25th, I was watching SKY News which was screening a lengthy report on the continuing work Medecine Sans Frontiers is doing in Southern Sudan, a region wracked by starvation and insidious religious violence. As infant children cried out in hunger, my sharp stainless steel knife sliced through mangoes and rockmelons, while a little girl was being treated for serious injuries sustained after being knocked down by a car, while the sick and starving walk for hours and days in suffocating heat I wash my sticky fingers and wipe the bench down, scraping watermelon seeds into my hand and throwing them into the bin.

Sitting in Church next to my mother later that morning, I asked myself where He is in all of this, is there really any balance in such horrifying contradictions? Is it fair that while I cut up fruit others starve? There is this seed of hope inside me, this instinctive knowledge that he is food for the hungry, that the currents of his love run strong and pure around the weak but I find it so hard to overcome my anger, my thinly veiled bitterness at the self-centred tilt of churchianity, the inability to comprehend that he has asked us to be his hands and his heart.

We sit in our pews or plush chairs saying the Old Testament points to Jesus, the New Testament points to Jesus then proceed to ignore him completely, preferring to listen to that which does not challenge us directly, sculpting his words into a more acceptable form. Where is our covenant with the poor? Why do we let them wallow in such squalid conditions, feebly explaining away our inaction, forgetting what John Donne said about none of us being an island. We only diminish our own souls when we let another needlessly slip from life.