A Just Faith Reflection on Christmas

Many times when Katy or I are contacted about participating in the CRS Fair Trade program, we learn that the inquirer is a Just Faith graduate, someone who has participated in a 30 week justice formation program designed to help fill the world with humble, faith-filled people who act with courageous justice and love with profound tenderness. Here at CRS in Baltimore about a dozen of us–some of us Catholic and others not–just completed our searching together. A final reading was from Elaine Prevallet’s “Toward a Spirituality for Global Justice: A Call to Kinship.” As I prepare to leave for a long Christmas weekend, I thought I would share an extensive quote from that book, which spoke to me:

“Centuries passed, and in the fullness of time, Mary, pregnant with the life of the messiah, greets her cousin Elizabeth with a joyous and revolutionary song. She praises the God of her people, who is manifesting anew, now in her own experience, the “wonderous deeds” that have been carried out in Israel’s memory through the centuries. Mary is, first of all, a woman; she is a member of an oppressed Palestinian society; she is young, uneducated, a peasant, unmarried, and pregnant. Certainly she can claim no entitlement whatsoever to be the bearer of the messiah, yet God ‘has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant’ (Lk. 1:48). God’s initiative, God’s graciousness, is the center of Mary’s joy.

Her song goes on to celebrate the coming of a new age: a time when God’s mighty arm will once again show itself on behalf of the lowly, the hungry, and the poor, and reverse the accepted economic and social order that has favored the powerful and the wealthy. God’s choice of this particular woman to be mother of the messiah portends a social order that manifests a compassionate and unprecedented reversal of the rules: God will ’scatter,’ ‘bring down,’ and ’send away empty’ those who have power and wealth; God will ‘exalt’ the lowly; those who are poor and hungry. The words are strong prophecy, and they promise a shockingly concrete transformation of society and its hierarchies.”

On behalf of the CRS Fair Trade program, may your Christmas celebrations be filled with joy and may you look toward the New Year filled with a spirit of economic justice.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 and is filed under Beyond Fair Trade, Fair Trade . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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