Fr. Roy Cimagala
CHRISTMAS, of course, is unavoidably associated with gift-giving. And that’s simply because Christmas is a season of love—the very love of God who in redeeming us has given us his Son as a gift. We could have no greater gift than God giving his Son to us for our own redemption.
And this gift of love of God is even greater than what he showed us when he created us out of sheer goodness. For this love is given when we ourselves actually do not deserve anymore to be loved by him due to our sins. And yet he continues to love us. There is greater love involved here.
And so, every time we give or receive gifts from relatives and friends, we should always remember that these gifts are mere tokens of the greatest gift that God has given us. They should move us to also give ourselves as gift to God and to everybody else. We have to take part in the dynamics of this giving of the gift of love initiated and perpetuated by God.
Forgetting this basic truth would inevitably spoil us and lead us to all sorts of dangers. Gifts should be an expression of the love of God and the love we ought to have with God and with everybody else. Otherwise, they can only be expression of something else that is not proper to us.
We should be thankful to God every time we receive gifts. We have to be thankful to him first before we give thanks to whoever gives us the gift. Let’s be careful in this detail, since very often we automatically thank the gift-giver and just forget about God from whom all good things come. As a consequence, we fail to capture the real and ultimate meaning and purpose of gift-giving and gifteceiving.
When we give gifts to relatives and friends, we should also remember that what we are doing is to actually act out the gift-giving of God’s love, goodness and mercy to mankind. That should be context of our gift-giving. Otherwise, it will degenerate into something harmful to us.
For sure, this concept of gift has to be understood well. It cannot be set within the framework of the purely human. That would make gift-giving a shallow and showy act of goodness, full of icing without the cake, rich in packaging with poor item inside.
The proper logic of gift-giving carries with it nothing less than the full wisdom of God. It involves justice but goes beyond justice. It brings the full weight of prudence to bear on all the steps of decision-making.
It involves nothing less than total self-giving, and necessarily leads us to the cross. And that’s simply because that gratuitous love of God for us has been fully shown to us by Christ who loved us all the way to the cross.
It surely has its moments of sweetness and tenderness, but it cannot avoid being exacting, since things have to conform to nothing less than God’s will, and not only to ours.
Our gift-giving and gifteceiving should have nothing to do with pride, greed, envy, sloth, etc. Rather it should generate true, genuine love that would unavoidably include humility, mercy, justice, solidarity, etc.
We should not forget that what are given and received are not just objects but our very own selves. Christ said this very clearly when asked about the greatest commandment which is nothing but loving and giving oneself.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important commandment,” Christ said. “The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22,37-39)
From these words we should then understand that we are meant to give ourselves as a gift to God and to the others. This should be our most basic attitude on which all the other considerations in our life have to be built. We are meant to be a gift to God and to everyone else. Are we, at least, aware of this truth? And once aware, are we doing something to live it to the full?
We have to be wary of worldly tricks that can spoil the true meaning and purpose of gift-giving and gifteceiving. There is commercialism and materialism that now abound in the world, sapping away the true essence of love. They feed the body but starve the soul.
This Christmas, let us look closely at the Child Jesus in the manger, accompanied by Mary and Joseph, and learn the true language of the gift of love.
E-mail: roycimagala@gmail.com
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