By Deepa Majumdar
The trees may be skeletal and the wind icy. The sky may look ominous, as if already laden with future snow. And the birds may have flown south for the winter. But the city lights are bright and illumined wreaths decorate each lamp post. Many are the homes decorated with ornate Christmas lights, some quite garish. Through many a curtained window you can see a quiet Christmas tree, sparkling with decorations and lights. And a gentle cheerfulness pervades the hearts of shoppers that throng the malls. Here and there you find a decorated manger. The story of the birth of Jesus is unmatched in its poetry and music. It is indeed fitting that the Son of Man, who was also the Son of God, should be born through immaculate conception, in a lowly manger, with “no crib for a bed.” For the Incarnation comes to earth to re-orient our distracted souls, crazed with desires, athirst for material goods and worldly power, towards that which truly matters … namely, a return to the divine. Three central virtues are significant to this return … namely, renunciation, obedience, and divine love and forgiveness. And Sweet Jesus, who possessed nothing, who obeyed his heavenly Father to the end, and who forgave his murderers, while on the cross, certainly set the greatest example for us.
And yet, this same Jesus, the most powerful protester ever, also said, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). By this, He meant perhaps, that politics and spirituality ought to be separate. Surely this quotation is fulfilled more than ever in the graphic difference between Barrabas and Jesus. It is revealed also in the fact that the Jewish people, when given a choice by Pontius Pilate, preferred Barrabas to be freed from the penalty of crucifixion … not Jesus. For short sighted as we are, we are far more enamored by the things which are Caesar’s than by those that are God’s. Indeed, Jesus’ mission, His powerful, gentle protest, and His moral triumph far surpassed the short term political goal of emancipating the Jewish people from the yoke of Rome. Clearly if the scale of Jesus’ mission were symbolized by the ocean, then that of the local revolutionary, or insurrectionary, Barrabas, who may have been a freedom fighter, seeking to free the Jews from Rome, should be represented by a drop of water. Nevertheless, the shouting mob addressed by Pontius Pilate, preferred Barrabas over Jesus.
Time magazine has named “The Protester” as the person of the year 2011. Some say this anonymous “protester” deserves a name … the name of Bradley Manning, an army intelligence analyst, now on trial for the biggest ever leak of US state secrets. Indeed, 2011 has been the year of courageous protests in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. With Syria still burning and Colonel Gaddafi dead … with Tahrir Square still vibrating with the march of thousands of women, especially outraged by images of women protesters beaten, kicked and dragged by the hair by troops … with the Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy’s arms broken by Egyptian security forces in Cairo … with tens of thousands of Russians expected to return to the streets of Russia to protest disputed elections and Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency … with the Occupy Wall Street protests radiating out from Zuccotti Park, occupying world-wide protests against economic injustice … indeed the world has, over the duration of 2011, reverberated with the outraged cry for justice, as it always has, over the millennia. But with this difference … Now protest is the hallmark of heroism … not saintliness, nor valor in war. Now the formal, structured democracy is the aim … not mere bedlam and revenge. Now the individual rises from the crowd, demanding to be recognized with the power of the vote. No longer will the many fall meekly behind tyrannical leaders gouging block votes. Indeed, the twentieth century may be marked by historians as the century of revolutions.
Yet, the revolution often revolves, returning again and again to the same node of injustice, with the pendulum of History swinging from one injustice to the next, bypassing the stable state of justice. Why does this happen? Why do we miss justice, despite our best efforts. What was it that Sweet Jesus taught, which we may have missed in our revolutions? First, only a scrupulously ethical form of protest leaves its fragrance on Earth … i.e. a protest that leads to a higher moral level. Every other protest is wiped clean from the tabula rasa of History. Second, all too often protests cause a temporary “love” of sorts among erstwhile foes, as the disempowered congregate before the Common Enemy. This “love” can be a cloak for hatred against the Common Enemy. As a result, it can be the weakest binding force ever, fading quickly, once the Enemy is chased off.
Third, it is a mistake for women to participate in men’s movements, without first negotiating hard for their own rights. I have often asked myself why women fight so ardently in men’s battles, risking their lives, their honor … and why they are so reticent to fight for themselves? Why do women not negotiate and bargain hard with men, when they are called upon by men to join their fights? Why didn’t Indian women bargain harder with Indian men during the nationalist movements for the freedom of India? Why haven’t communist women negotiated and bargained hard for their own rights? Why did they believe the myth that their rights would be guaranteed by the “revolution”? And are Egyptian women vigilant enough to watch out for their rights now? Are they bargaining hard with their male comrades … or are they romantic enough to fall for the myth of the “revolution”? Do they believe that a mythic “freedom” for Egyptian society will naturally usher freedom also for women? Unlike other oppressed groups, women are intimately intertwined with their patriarchal enemies. Their freedom is therefore the hardest to win.
Finally, revolutions tend to fail perhaps because we lack all those virtues which made Sweet Jesus so special. We, the protesters, tend to lack that renunciation from outcomes, which comes only in the wake of faith and surrender to the divine. Even as we sing, “Sweet Jesus, my shelter/ You are my faithful friend /The refuge that I run to/ When my world comes closing in,” we run after what we were denied … mainly worldly power. Thus our revolutions are the very nemesis of renunciation. Most of our revolutionary goals tend to be worldly. What we seek, is not mere justice, but a slice of worldly power. Above all, the Age of Revolution has destroyed altogether the virtue of righteous obedience. Even as the protester seeks above all, to disobey unrighteous laws, she forgets the basic dictum taught by Mohandas K. Gandhi … namely, that only those who know how to obey, will know how to disobey. And while ethical disobedience of unrighteous laws is the right thing to do, the virtue of righteous obedience is a basic spiritual need in human nature, which may be the reason why “obedience” is one among the monastic vows in many religions. Perhaps it is because we have so lost the art of righteous obedience, and we are so rabid in our individualism, that even as religion fails, technology forces us to practice obedience. For the machine we handle demands a certain measure of obedience. Sweet Jesus obeyed his heavenly Father all the way to the Cross. All we do is obey the dictates of the different machines we handle … the cell phone, the computer, the camera. But what we need to do, is admire whole-heartedly the virtue of righteous obedience, instead of seeing it as something weakening. This would strengthen the admirable discipline that protesters often already possess.
Above all, our revolutions, it would seem, fail, because they lack the all-powerful virtue of love and forgiveness, which Jesus came to earth to teach. Revolutions often stop short at a chimerical horizontal “love” that translates to hatred-for-the-enemy. Ego bound as they are, revolutions do not include love for the enemy, nor forgiveness, nor concern for the soul of the enemy. Very rare is the protester who can do what a Tibetan monk did. Even as he was being tortured by the Chinese, he feared losing his compassion for his torturer, more than he feared the torture itself.
Christmas then ought to be a revolution of the heart … an awakening of Love that awakens the intellect and harmonizes friend with foe, radiating a mantle of true peace upon our troubled earth. Only then would we have given birth to Jesus in our hearts and experienced the real Christmas. For the human heart is the true manger where Jesus is to be born again and again.
(The author is Associate Professor, Purdue University, USA)