Merry __mas

PRAY, tell, where was the Christ last Christmas?
I did not see Him in the frenzied shopping rush causing all those monstrous traffic jams around the malls. All I saw was compulsive consumption, offered as it were at capitalism’s unholy shrines.
I did not hear Him in the cacophony of sounds – from the consumer noise to the piped-in carols – at SM or Robinsons, Nepo or even Saver’s Mall. All I heard above the din was the tinkling of cash registers, sweet, sweet music to Sy and Gokongwei’s long, long ears.
Commercialization has taken over religion. An even more apt assertion: Commercialization is the new religion. People are more zealous in going to the shopping malls than to churches.
And then, witness how one American fast-food chain capitalized on the pure-Filipino tradition of the nine-day dawn Masses to impact its commercial presence: Si_bang Gabi incomplete without the M, in the form of the logo of the food franchise. It is not only that burgers have taken over bibingka and puto-bumbong as after-Mass delicacies. The burger joints have taken precedence over the churches themselves.
Pasintabi po lamang, Mang Oca but the Christ was nowhere too – with all that pushing, shoving and foot-stomping – at the Giant Lantern Festival sites. The Christmas Star there reduced to a mere, albeit grand, spectacle of light from its sublime symbolism of love – the greatest manifestation of love that is the birth of the Christ.
Pray, tell, who still know the meaning of the Christmas lantern?
I remember my high school theology professor – the then-Rev. Fr. Paciano B. Aniceto – lecturing that the Christmas lantern took after the Star of Bethlehem that pointed to where the Christ was born and thereby guided both lowly shepherds and majestic magi to the manger. Hence – the good Apu Ceto explained – wherever the Christmas lantern is hoisted, posted or hung, there the Christ is, there His love is. The lantern being the Star’s representation.
Thus, of all the symbols of Christmas – from mistletoes and Christmas trees to Santa Claus and the snowman – it is the lantern that has the greatest, if not the only, theological value. Are we even remotely aware of this?
Star-struck we all are: always finding celebrities but never the Christ in all those stars. Which this Christmastime also came down from the celluloid firmament to regale us with that escapist farce that was the Metro Manila Film Festival. Ah, were the faithful as religiously devoted to Christ as to Zsa-Zsa, Pops and Juday...
So I grant that it was SRO, standing-room-only dummy, at the churches the eve of Christmas Day, the worshipers even spilling out to the churchyards.
Did they come to welcome their Savior? Or to show off their new clothes, to meet and joke with friends, to unleash their unruly children, to be and do just about everything but to worship?
And so it was during consecration that the loud clop-clop of some boys’ new pairs of shoes and the shrieks of little girls running by the very altar heralded the transformation of the wafer into the very body of Christ and the wine into His very blood.
Joy to the world, what lord has come?