Remembering Christmas

(Ruben Abati)-- …[Christmas] was also that time of the year for the reinforcement of family values. People whom you had not seen for the whole year travelled home from their stations to be part of Christmas. You got the chance to meet cousins, make new friends, and sing till you almost went hoarse.

I wasn’t much of a singer or drummer- my friends used to laugh each time I missed a note or a beat and we would spend weeks afterwards mimicking each other. In short, Christmas was real fun. But it was relatively a simple, inexpensive celebration, year after year. Our parents did not have to borrow, or go bankrupt, or agonize, for Christmas to be meaningful.

We got one or two new clothes and shoes: those were the usual Christmas gifts. On Christmas day, after church, lunch didn’t have to be anything extra-ordinary: it was no more than rice and chicken. In those days, chicken was a special delicacy, reserved for Sundays, or special occasions like birthdays or Christmas, very much unlike now that every child acquires the taste for tasty chicken from the womb! On Boxing Day, we either visited friends or stayed home, and played with firecrackers and bangers on the streets. Those children who could not afford bangers were not left out. They improvised with local devices made by blacksmiths. That contraption produced even better effect.

The Church is a Mother, Not an Entrepreneur

“[T]oday is also a day to pray for [the] Church, because of so much sterility within the people of God.  A sterility arising from egoism, from power … when the Church believes she can do everything, that she can take charge of the consciences of the people, walk along the road of the Pharisees, of the Sadducees, along the road of hypocrisy, yes, the Church is sterile. Let’s pray. That this Christmas our Church may be open to the gift of God, that she may allow herself to be surprised by the Holy Spirit and be a Church that gives birth, a mother Church. Many times I think that in some places the Church is more like an entrepreneur than a mother.”

Pope Francis

Remember, You're Dust...

It was quite a sight on Wednesday, 22 February (2012), as many Christians showed up at different places, offices, banks, hospitals, bus-stops, and markets across Lagos (and across the world too), with ashes on their foreheads.  That these Christians included men, women and children; a mix of high-flying business executives, bank managers, traders, market women, bus drivers, and okada riders did not help matters.  More so, for the uninitiated, the fact that the ashes traced the sign of the cross made the sight a bit eerie.  “Has any cult come abroad for some mission?” They might have wondered.

For Christians, however, it was a sobering day. It was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.  Lent is the forty-weekday period of prayer, fasting and abstinence, and almsgiving before Easter Sunday. Christians troop to churches to receive ashes on Ash Wednesdays. The ashes come from the burnt palm fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday.

At Christ the King, Ilasamaja, Lagos, on 22 February, the crowd was enormous.  Even with four Masses and ten priests and ministers, the three thousand-plus capacity church overflowed with worshippers at each Mass, sometimes with those outside outnumbering those inside the church. Such is the significance Christians place on the reception of ashes on Ash Wednesday, a biblical symbol of mourning and penance, of conversion and repentance. Interestingly, a good majority of those who received ashes on that day were not Catholics, or even Christians.