Through The Gospel
with Dom Helder Camara
So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee for Judea, to David’s house and line, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with the child. Now it happened that, while they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first born. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in the manger because there was no room for them in the living space.( LUKE 2:4-7)
One can’t help being moved by this story whenever one hears this. It’s Christmas time now, Dom Helder. Have there been any Christmases that have had a marked effect on your life?
In part of the world like ours, you know, we can live this scene for ourselves almost everyday. Because we are actually living through the ‘drama of the land’. Big companies buy up acres of land in the country's interior and families that live there for years and years are the n oblige to leave. When they arrive in the cities, Recife for instance, they look for somewhere to live. Often the wife is pregnant. They end up by building miserable hovels – you might say sub hovels where no one else wants to live, nearly always in a swamps. And their Christ is born. There is no ox and donkey but there is a pig-pigs and chicken sometimes, that’s the crib, the living crib…
At Christmas, naturally, I celebrate mass in various churches. But I also like to say mass in one of this living cribs. Why should I go for on pilgrimage to Bethlehem, to the historic birthplace of Christ when I see Christ being born here, physically, every moment of the day? He’s called Joao, Francisco, Antonio, Sebastaio, Severino… but he is the Christ.
Oh, how blind we are, how deaf we are! How hard it is to grasp that the gospel is still going on.
So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee for Judea, to David’s house and line, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with the child. Now it happened that, while they were there, the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first born. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in the manger because there was no room for them in the living space.( LUKE 2:4-7)
One can’t help being moved by this story whenever one hears this. It’s Christmas time now, Dom Helder. Have there been any Christmases that have had a marked effect on your life?
In part of the world like ours, you know, we can live this scene for ourselves almost everyday. Because we are actually living through the ‘drama of the land’. Big companies buy up acres of land in the country's interior and families that live there for years and years are the n oblige to leave. When they arrive in the cities, Recife for instance, they look for somewhere to live. Often the wife is pregnant. They end up by building miserable hovels – you might say sub hovels where no one else wants to live, nearly always in a swamps. And their Christ is born. There is no ox and donkey but there is a pig-pigs and chicken sometimes, that’s the crib, the living crib…
At Christmas, naturally, I celebrate mass in various churches. But I also like to say mass in one of this living cribs. Why should I go for on pilgrimage to Bethlehem, to the historic birthplace of Christ when I see Christ being born here, physically, every moment of the day? He’s called Joao, Francisco, Antonio, Sebastaio, Severino… but he is the Christ.
Oh, how blind we are, how deaf we are! How hard it is to grasp that the gospel is still going on.