“Let us not treat them as burdens to society.”
The Advent season starts tomorrow, Sunday, November 28. In this season of anticipation, all Christian communities from every denomination hearken in hopeful expectation as they prepare to celebrate the birth of Our Savior Lord Jesus Christ. This is the time in the Liturgical Calendar that is mostly associated with festivities and observance of Yuletide traditions and practices. It is the beginning of the liturgical year in Western Christianity and is part of the wider Christmas and holiday season.
By this time of the year, Divisoria and malls are already teeming with shoppers, preparations for family and office reunions are underway. Surely, the proverbial festive mood is happily in the air. But we all know that the last two years were anything but normal.
The COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered not only how we go about our usual routines but even how we see things, and this includes the way we conduct ourselves in public, how we work, relate with family members, or simply interact with people and a host of other “normal” activities which we took for granted before this catastrophe rudely disrupted the whole of humanity. With the arrival of adequate vaccine supplies and more people getting vaccinated, we can only hope that the worst is finally over.
Yet even as the pandemic is tapering off, at least in this part of the world, the devastation wrought by this once-in-a-lifetime health crisis will be felt for years to come. Socio-economic challenges will linger, economic dislocation and destitution have grown disproportionately, reducing countless families to utter penury. Most are in a quandary on how to deal with this gargantuan reality, which is the ever-increasing number of poor and hungry families.
During the 5th World Day of the Poor which was held last November 14, Pope Francis devoted the better part of his message to the proper and just way to treat the poor in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel. For the Holy Father, the face of God revealed by Jesus is that of “a Father concerned for and close to the poor. In everything, Jesus teaches that poverty is not the result of fate, but a concrete sign pointing to his presence among us. We do not find him when and where we want, but see him in the lives of the poor, in their sufferings and needs, in the often inhuman conditions in which they are forced to live.” According to him, “the poor are true evangelizers, for they were the first to be evangelized and called to share in the Lord’s joy and his kingdom.”
The Holy Father says that the “poor, always and everywhere, evangelize us, because they enable us to discover in new ways the true face of the Father. “They have much to teach us. Besides participating in the sensus fidei, they know the suffering Christ through their own sufferings. It is necessary that we all let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to recognize the salvific power of their lives and to place them at the center of the Church’s journey. We are called to discover Christ in them, to lend them our voice in their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to understand them and to welcome the mysterious wisdom that God wants to communicate to us through them. Our commitment does not consist exclusively of activities or programmes of promotion and assistance; what the Holy Spirit mobilizes is not an unruly activism, but above all an attentiveness that considers the other in a certain sense as one with ourselves. This loving attentiveness is the beginning of a true concern for their person which inspires me effectively to seek their good” (Evangelii Gaudium, 198-199).”
In sum, the Holy Father exhorts all Christians to follow in Christ’s footsteps by not treating the poor with contempt or disdain, not to see them as a burden to society but instead to regard them with love, compassion, and understanding. For in giving, the giver receives as much from the poor.
The pandemic affords all of us the singular opportunity to seek those who suffer poverty in whatever form, extend a helping hand to them and impart moral and spiritual hope to those who carry the burden of crushing poverty. In this context, Pope Francis affirms the meaning of Christ’s observation that “the poor you will always have with you”.
The poor will always be with us, yet that should not make us indifferent, but summon us instead to a mutual sharing of life that does not allow proxies. The poor are not people “outside” our communities, but as Pope Francis describes them, they are “brothers and sisters whose sufferings we should share, in an effort to alleviate their difficulties and marginalization, restore their lost dignity and ensure their necessary social inclusion.”
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