"Bells are pealing, and yet still everyone is suffering"

"Bells are pealing, 
and yet still everyone is suffering"

A Christmas day rambling
by Kat Ulrike

Bells are pealing, and yet still everyone is suffering.

These are the words this writer had said to himself as he passed in San Sebastian church and seeing its needy bystanders waiting for charity such as a passerby to give coins or food on. The scene is quite common though especially in this so-called season of sharing, sharing that is shorn off of significance save for a face value to impress themselves as "caring" and "thoughtful."

However, amidst the messages that emphasise giving and sharing, few are serious besides those of priests, nuns, and the so-called concerned who actually did just to impress themselves. This writer find it common to see them doing their virtue, but how about others, particularly those who did but for the sake of making an impression of "becoming virtuous" amongst others? Are they seriously doing it as one with the people, or merely just trying to escape from the realities that haunted them as social sinners, Social sinners that includes those who can't even lift the really concerned out of disgust and of not giving just to the disenfranchised? 

It ain't be sharing nor giving but a mockery of it. They had gave them but not uplift its spirit. Driven by impression seeing such drives yet on the other hand can't even uplift its fellow by turning that aspiration into an opportunity. Of what is having a job if there's an end of a contract? Of what is building that house if it is substandard and only to be swept by sudden wind and rain? Of what is donating rice if that rice likely to rot after months being stored in a warehouse? Despite their so-called drives and pseudo-charities still the vast mass are greatly seen waiting something that is worth real. Be it jobs, education, justice that can be really felt and not a mere semblance of it. They also roll up their sleeves, but that work of theirs are meant for few days, lucky if that is for a week for survival; but then they are still waiting, seeking for someone who has the heart of gold to lift their limb, mind, heart and spirit to carry the task. 

Perhaps, amidst all the calls and of those who afford to "help", few would really dare to talk and really give aid not just with these beggars, but even the slum dwellers, prostitutes, displaced victims of war and calamity, people those from high treated them as bullshit than a person in need of immediate concern and given justice. Christ did mingle with them, healed their illnesses, defended the unjustly blamed, shared with food amidst the ire of those trying hard to be holy and righteous and yet failing to serve those in need; and when Christ died, he entered hell and freed the damned from their damnation with all their reprentances. 

And yet in this modern-day suffering, who's gonna take them out from damnation? As the rest rather pray and pay indulgences for the sake of appearing righteous and full of pride, there are those who willingly enter hell to bring the willing out of their suffering, be it poverty, repression, disenfranchisement, despair, misery that made them into sin and trying to escape on that cycle. For sure amidst all the concerns they can't even talk even to a single prostitute for the fear of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and the narrowest idea equating talking with them to just favors of sex, or even beggars and vagabonds for the fear of these people are thieves if not using the alms money for their drugs. Of what is freedom if freedom is limited to a mere selected few treated as an academic treatise or an impression seeking for an applause? Bullshit! That is not the freedom being yearned by many and died by those struggled for! 

Again, the bells continue to peal, but these people are still waiting the one who will rise from their suffering. The suffering is not limited to the wretched of the earth as Orlando Castillo said, but to those whose aspiration includes breaking free from the cycle. 

Or they are willing to rise up for themselves, but they need a guide who had heard the bell that repeatingly peals, "for the kingdom of God is in you" as what Tolstoy says.