Christmas Trek and Back

GUEST EDITORIAL BY PULENG MATSANENG

South Africa’s migratory culture makes the Christmas season especially vibrant. People plan for the season as early as the beginning of the year; many in the townships taking part in savings clubs.

These clubs differ. There are those in which people buy huge quantities of groceries over the year to share, often before Christmas Day.

Other folks save up in clubs to travel to see their loved ones. In at least one club, people save to buy cattle so as to start small farming. This turns the act of saving for Christmas into a “gift” that may have lasting good effect.

This illustrates a point: in many ways the decision to come together, to share gifts, is an act of making a difference — small or large, lasting or transient — in our lives and the world we live in. In lives of scarcity we try to create, if not abundance, then at least a little extra.

When Christ was born we see a different yet similar world, a world of rich and poor.

The beautiful element of the Nativity narrative is the search for him by the Three Kings and the shepherds, and their arrival to pay him homage in total love. The magi offer their treasures to the baby Christ, and the shepherds are emotionally moved, as the kings are: they offer him their love.

Not everyone is pleased, as we see in the gospel of Matthew. The jealous King Herod has his own agenda, one of preserving his interests.

His search is ugly, not to affirm but to kill the child Jesus, even if it means killing innocent children in the process. This journey he undertakes is for self-interest, in contrast to that of the magi and shepherds.

Set in our society, it also runs contrary to the kind of financial journey of township savings clubs that seek, at their minimum, to connect with others, and at their best to do lasting good.

In the Holy Family we find those who value the gift-economy, ultimately pondering on how best to share Christ with the world.

Today we are also given the opportunity to see Christ in his birth, one happening in an unforeseen place which at the end allows us to search for him in unlikely places.

For it was God’s promise to the world to give us the child Jesus. How can we at this time of our lives value this gift, as the Three Kings and the shepherds did?

We live in a modern world with many demands which can be beyond us, a world of displaced people, those that go hungry each day, of wars in some countries, and the poor struggling in a world of the rich that seems immune to the rest.

Is there no way that we can balance these needs and crises? Can something as small as a township savings club offer us an image of a way in which we can use whatever resources we have this season to create a slightly more humane world?

On this continent, as in every Christmas season, we will see the great treks: people  travelling far to visit families. In Zulu people say “ngisehla” meaning “I am going home to visit family”; when they come back, they say “ngisakhuphuka”, which means “I am returning back to my work place”.

By reconnecting and celebrating, perhaps we are trying to emulate the shepherds and magi, coming to see the Christ in our neighbour.

It’s important, too, in this gracious time filled with love, not to forget him who brought this joy to us.

The insight of St Ignatius of Loyola can help us. The power of being led to looking at what makes me a different person in this world is explained by him in this way: “Indifference to all created things is the way to find the will of God and fulfil it.”

Who does not want to fulfil God’s promise in this world? Aren’t our attempts, using money and travel and gifts, simply a means to this end?

Puleng Matsaneng works for the Jesuit Institute SA in Johannesburg.