Unveiling the Light

Twas the night before Christmas,
And all through the media,
Everyone was a gabbing and jumping about.
“Look at me they shout … look how I help,
Let me serve this turkey to all those about.
See my compassion that I am so quick to display,
I love to be generous … just so it is others that pay!”

Where ever the news service a camera turns on,
There we will find the perpetual con.
If the poor or the hungry or the hurting are about,
“Look at me, look at me,” they are surely to shout.

“Here have this grant and a loan over there
Have you ever seen anyone ever so fair?
What do you need, where do you place your greed?
I am sure to grant it with some program or deed.
Don’t ask all the questions from where it might come,
Be sure it will help many and only hurt some.
Yes there will be a day of reckoning you dote,
But by then I will already have had your cast vote!”

So we go about and vote ourselves all we need,
After all if from the government, is it really called greed?
Why should I have to call upon others for compassion?
This way it is my right and just another government transaction.
No virtue is needed and not the generosity of others.
By rule I will take it even if it comes from your mother.
Why should I pay for my failings and gambles?
Isn’t my right to happiness guaranteed in the preamble?

Let others depend on their neighbors and friends!
Not me for on others I will never depend.
The compassion of Christ I to others leave,
The power of Congress, that is all that I need.
And if by chance my riches this vote fails to buy.
Next time I will show them not to fail this guy.
Meanwhile the state will surely raise their tax rates,
To keep me in line for their own voting dates.

And when there are no more from whom we can confiscate,
Then to the compassionate I will turn to appropriate.
And when Jesus returns, look at me I will shout,
I called for the programs to aid the poor you came to help!
Will He thank me and praise me for all that I called for?
Or will He condemn me for the greed found in my core?
Compassion I killed with my government mandates,
Humanity I ignored as to the numbers I did gravitate.
No humanity and love to help humans did I call upon,
Instead I made programs so to ignore individual wrongs.
The human heart I never developed and mercy I never knew,
For by programs and government, of the poor I met few.
I did not eliminate them nor alleviate their plight,
But hid them I did as in the darkness of night.

Jesus Christ came to save us one at a time,
But government sees an individual as almost a crime.
It is numbers and votes and programs that deliver,
The power and control that makes the human soul whither.
Programs to keep from human suffering our lives free,
Was never a desire Jesus Christ wanted us to see.
We must face it near and dear in the life that we live
For only in this way do we learn the virtue of lives that to others give.

So on that Christmas Eve that celebrates the Virgin birth,
May you embrace this life and all upon this earth.
Look not onto others to heal the world’s ills and pains,
But embrace them yourself and from your heart do not refrain.
It is in this experience of the continuing human plight,
That we learn to seek Jesus and keep Him forever in our sight.

Have a Merry Christmas

Father Steven Foppiano