Feast days and Traditions
Dr. Michel E. Abs
Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches
Christmas and New Year's Eve in the Middle East have a special character at the level of society as a whole, but in Lebanon we witness specific traditions in this field, which deserve our attention because of the meanings and lessons they carry in them.
Two phenomena characterize these two holidays and deserve contemplation and analysis.
The first phenomenon is the decorations of Christmas and the New Year and their celebrations, while the second phenomenon is the fortune-tellers and the soothsayers and their public appearances, their hypocrisy and their manipulation of people's feelings and perchance their fate too.
Christmas decorations have become a widely shared Lebanese phenomenon among all segments of the Lebanese society, regardless of their affiliations. We had witnessed them in the past in a somewhat subtle way, but today they have "invaded" all regions, especially the regions with a non-Christian population majority, and this is what deserves to be emphasized and praised.
During the Christmas period, videos circulated on social networking sites in Lebanon showing Lebanese communities celebrate Christmas and how they gather around a decorated Christmas tree, in one square or another, with comments that deserve appreciation, especially when they indicate through the names they mention that all the celebrants are Muslims. The same applies to decorations in shops, or hairdressers’ parlors. What deserves our attention is that these comments, in their form, carry kindness and friendliness, showing the extent to which we can talk about a Lebanese culture based on mutual social maturation among the Lebanese in terms of how people harmoniously interact in terms of daily life and events.
This phenomenon, which has become widely public today, is not strange to the Lebanese, as large numbers of Muslim families deliberately decorate the Christmas tree inside their homes and even prepare a nativity scene, but without the small figures that represent Christ, Mary and Joseph, in accordance with the Islamic belief that no embodiment of the prophets is to be displayed, neither in pictures nor in effigies.
In the same context a thing that deserves to be mentioned to our reader is the fact that children with special needs who were in-training at our specialized center in Hermel, “Dar Al-Bahij”, used to the make models of the nativity scene, and these models were sold by the people of Hermel who in the vast majority are Shiite Muslims. This was during the period of the Lebanese civil war, when the country was divided along sectarian lines and when the various regions of the country were cut off from one another.
In the same context, we also found in some churches located in religiously mixed areas that a large percentage of children who celebrate Palm Sunday are from Muslim families. Their families loved the Palm Sunday celebration, so they encouraged their children to participate with their friends in the Palm Sunday procession.
On the other hand- and we must mention this matter in order to complete the Lebanese social, psychological and cultural scene- Ramadan Iftars have turned into occasions for a unifying social meeting between the Lebanese, as a high percentage of Christian families and institutions presently celebrate Iftars and invite their Muslim friends to them.
All of these phenomena occur in a country that appears to be divided and in which conflicts are about to break out every now and then, but the undeniable reality is that the oil slick of homogenous groups of people is expanding, and that people are united outside the framework of political tensions, where there are no challenges, neither in power nor in business money making ventures.
As for fortune-tellers or soothsayers who pretend to know the issues of the unseen, the future and the beyond, you see them settling on the screens of television stations entering into a race with one another in misleading people and leading them to that which pertains to the realm of the ridiculous.
These stations pave the way for the emergence of such "prophets" by promoting the actual “happenings” of their soothsaying declarations for previous years, whereas all of them are hypocrites who pretend to be dignified and knowledgeable.
These "forecasters", who adhere to the unseen, attend and begin to narrate the future with assurances that are not to be doubted in the least and in a bold manner that reaches the point of insolence. They decide the fates of leaders, peoples and phenomena, and try to generalize as much as possible to avoid being held accountable in the future for the failure of what they had predicted. Their "prophecies" are more suggestive than clear, in anticipation of any perchance expected need to retract what they had said accusing the listeners of having misunderstood their messages.
The problem is that these hypocrites do what they do in a society that lives in a state of suspicion and loss, with great fear of what the future holds for it. They harm people, the naive ones in particular, individually and collectively, as you find the public discussing what they said, over a period of several days or weeks, as if it were a reality.
No less hypocritical than fortune-tellers are horoscope specialists, although they are armed with the universally recognized science of astronomy as they depend on it in order to “determine the fate” of those born under one sign or the another.
As for the great calamity, it lies in the fact that all these "forecasters", by imagination or by horoscopes, have opened consulting offices, which are crowded with people, and their schedules are reserved for several months ahead. When one of my students wanted to study this phenomenon in order to prepare her Master's thesis in Sociology, one of the "Prophets" refused to give her an interview date and instructed her to take an appointment like everyone else and to pay her the value of the interview as if she was one of her customers. Their arrogance has reached an advanced level.
These people who belong to one political or economic group or the other, and who are as if the only thing that they lack is this handful of false prophets, are to be pitied as they are lost among groups of hypocrites from various fields.
If these lost people, who are searching for answers and psychological comfort, had taken upon themselves to read the words of the Incarnate Master, the Bearer of humanity's pain, they would have saved themselves a lot of hardships and suffering, and would have known where the comfort lies and where the truth lies.
At the end of this article, we need to quote what came in the Bible about these phenomena:
“Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. For this reason, take up the full armor of God so that you may be able to stand your ground on the evil day, and having done everything, to stand.” (Ephesians 6:12-16)
And “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” (Ephesians 5:11)
And to conclude “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” (Timothy 4:3-4)