I remember Fr. Donelan, SJ telling the story behind what prompted him to set up his foundation for children: One cold and stormy day, he saw street kids outside his bedroom window. They were huddled together under his air conditioner, trying to dry off and seeking warmth on that blustery day. He took the children in, fed them, gave them a little something and sent them on their way. While Fr. Donelan watched them eat, he realized and told himself, “You can’t fake poverty.”

 

Long after he had set up his foundation, Fr. Donelan said that many of his rich friends often asked, “Father, do you actually believe everyone who asks you for money? Do you know that some of them trump up sob stories to appear more hard-up than they actually are?” Fr. Donelan said that he would tell them, “You can’t disguise poverty. You can’t fake it.”

 

Christmas is about the poverty of God, a poverty that he did not disguise, a poverty he did not fake. It’s depth is something I’m just beginning to discover.

 

For more than forty years of my life, I have always envisioned God in prayer. I know many people envision Jesus. Some pray to Mary a lot. Others feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. My imagination logs on immediately to God. There was a stretch in my life along which I often wondered why God-becoming-man had to happen. That’s very much like asking why Christmas had to happen, because, rightly or wrongly, I could actually envision the world being saved only by God who created it, without the Son. I can imagine a God who can save the world even without becoming human like us in Jesus—and that’s no heresy.

 

It was only lately that through many hours of solitude, I asked that question again: My dear, loving God, minamahal kong Dios, bakit naging tao po kayo? What was the point of your Incarnation? Why was there a Christmas at all?

 

Last week, while waiting for the first Simbanggabi Mass to begin, for some strange reason, I imagined God, taking my cheeks into his divine hands and saying:   

 

“My beloved anak: it is important that I am not only a God after whose image and likeness you are made. It is also very important that I take on an image and likeness that you can recognize as very much like yourself. Anak, it is important that I am not only Providence, the giver of life to whom you run when you feel you’re running out. It is also very important, anak, that I know what it feels to run on empty, to reach the edge beyond which there’s no longer anything to eat, to depend on, to touch; a God who knows what it is to be vulnerable, to be in need, even to beg.

 

“Anak, it is important not only that I am an all-knowing God. It is also important that you know how I have experienced being anxious and uncertain because I could only know so much, I could only see so far in the future; a God who wasn’t entirely sure of his fate despite acting on his conscience all the time. It is important, Anak, that I, your God, am not only a genius God, but is also someone who needed to understand why. I also asked, “Why?”, and I knew how it felt to never fully know the reason why.

 

“Anak, hindi mo nadaragdagan ang kadakilaan ko kapag sinasabi mo sa akin na ako ang iyong lakas. Subalit, huwag kang mag-alala; hindi ka nagkukulang sa akin kapag naniniwala ka na kahit ako man, minsa din ay naubusan ng lakas, hinimatay rin sa pagod, suminghap-singhap din dahil nagkulang sa hininga.

 

“It is crucial that I am not only the fulfillment of all your longing. It is also important for you to know that I myself longed for someone in my loneliness, hungered for someone to care for me as I came home after caring for others…and found no one there. It is crucial that I, your God, not only hear you crying out to me, but that I myself also cried out for someone, for anyone to be there for me, especially at the hour of my greatest pain. Sure, it is important that I have inexhaustible mercy and forgiveness, yes, for that I have. But it’s also very important that you realize that I know how difficult it is to forgive and be merciful, how even doubly and triply difficult it is to ask for mercy and forgiveness precisely because people often do not want to forgive and show mercy.

 

“My beloved son, why should you only think that I require you to make me the most important part of your life? I want you to realize that I am also very, very happy to have you in mine, that you stay in my life, and remain there with me. Not only do I appreciate that you long for me, anak. I want you to know how much I, your God, long for you as well.”  

 

That presence that I felt then continues to resonate through my prayer these days. My God is poor. And he didn’t fake it. I guess that’s what the incarnation is about, a poverty of God. God’s most visible, most tangible sign of loving us is drawing so near to us that he resembles us so closely, we can identify with him. His greatest wealth is his readiness to be poor, uncertain, longing, and vulnerable like us. His greatest proof of power is his willingness to give it up. He proves his divinity by pairing himself off not with the angles or cosmic principalities or the extra-worldly—no, but with humanity; humanity in all its rawness, visibility, woundedness, loneliness, and grime. From the heart of humanity, God whispers to us, “Anak, it is okay to be human. It is no crime. Look at me in the manger: it is your reality that I embraced to be my own reality.” How rich we are to have a God who makes himself poor by becoming like us, so that we may never again think that God only looks out at us from his bedroom window—while we huddle together for warmth outside of his dwelling place! No; never. Our God is poor like and with us. In Jesus, God huddles with us. He knows how it feels to shudder, to be fearful, to hunger and thirst and long for warmth. This is our greatest wealth, Jesus Christ, the poverty of God, a poverty he did not care to disguise or fake. The divine did not fear to be human.

 

What is the opposite of being human? Being divine is not the opposite of being human. Being inhuman is the opposite of being human. To be inhuman is to believe nobody else matters but us; to amass wealth, arrogate power, even steal from the poor, all for the sake of our own comfort and joy, and nothing else. To be inhuman is therefore to be pseudo-god. The real God became man in order to draw close to the poor. The pseudo-god maintains a cordon sanitaire from the world of hunger, of pain, and need. The pseudo-god allows himself to be affected by the poor only insofar as they worship him, insofar as they do not jeopardize his contentment, or God-forbid infect him with their sickening indigence. Yet, why do we suppose God was born human and born poor? So that we may never forget that divinity speaks the most crucial truth not from affluence, but from deficiency. In poverty do we clearly see Divinity labouring, striving, suffering, and pouring himself out in order to fill it. In being deeply human, we huddle tightly with the Divine with God who will never fake his poverty, because he will never fake his love for us. May we never be afraid to be divine, by never being afraid to be truly and lovingly human.

 

 

- Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ