The Nativity and Public Space

by Remmon E. Barbaza

As Christmas nears, many of us feel oppressed by the madness of road traffic, long gift lists, and endless parties and reunions. But we also relish the joy and peace of Christmas in the quiet of our homes. These opposing experiences point to a tension between private and public spaces.

The story of the Nativity is itself a struggle involving private and public spaces. The God who chose to insert Himself in human space and history, who “pitched tent among us”—the same God who made space for the heavens and the earth in loving acts of letting-be (“Let there be…”)—now finds Himself without a space to lay His head. There is no room for Him in the inn.

*image taken from The Biblical World

So there He is to be born, in a manger, marginalized from the very beginning. He knows these margins very well, these edges of human society and history. This God will begin from the margins, live in the margins, and die in the margins of our human spaces. His earthly life is a story of reaching out to those who live in the margins, those who are marginalized, and hence out-cast. We want them out of our spaces. But God wants them back in.

Although not couched in the socio-political language of “private and public spaces,” the teachings of Jesus do point to something that speaks of such distinctions. He would, for example, exhort people to transcend the selfish confines of the family. The family is a kind of private space. We feel at home in it. But Jesus says that we cannot be called children of God if our love was limited to our families. For indeed even the cruelest evildoers among us love their own families.

We Filipinos pride ourselves in having close and tightly knit families, which indeed is a wonderful thing in itself. But as in any other good thing, when corrupted it can degenerate into something destructive.

That our state is run mostly by families and clans—and often with the same names over and over again—tells us not only that the family is stronger than the state, but also that, on the fundamental level, we have not yet learned how to recognize the public space that lies beyond the narrow and often selfish confines of the private space.

The Ampatuan massacre is an extreme example of the violent imposition of the self in public space, where the will was not satisfied with simply marginalizing people who challenged the legitimacy of its power, but went so far as to brutally and physically wipe them out altogether from our shared space.

Violating laws with impunity can thus be seen as an illegitimate appropriation of public space. But before we fall into the illusion that the impunity claimed by the Ampatuans is something extreme and remote from most of us, we would do well to think again. For we might discover that there are degrees of acting with impunity, and that each one of us acts in one degree or another.

Gone may be the wang-wangs, one of the loudest and most disgusting examples of the imposition of the self in public space. But we still get subjected to the tasteless self-promotion of public officials who force the ugly sight of their names and faces upon public space, or car owners who seem to demand entitlement by announcing that they are “LAWYERS” or “PMA CLASS so and so” (yes, in screaming capitals), or doctors who are not necessarily responding to emergency calls but seem to demand special treatment through their “Doctors on Call” stickers or plates (thereby perhaps preventing other doctors from actually responding to life-and-death situations).

How many times did we get stuck in traffic because some selfish driver stopped right at the street corner, totally unmindful of others whose right to unobstructed roads was not respected at all? And when such a thing happens, how many times do we see traffic enforcers look the other way? (One need only observe what happens at the corner of Kamias and EDSA, for instance, on any given weekday, to see how disorder has reached insane levels.)

How many times have we heard of a friend or a relative die in an accident because a couple of buses or trucks engaged in a mad race, or else “encountered brake failure,” indicating that their drivers and operators did not recognize that the right to drive a vehicle is exercised in public space and therefore comes with the serious responsibility of ensuring public safety? Did not the Vatican itself identify reckless driving and road bullying as two of the modern sins?

In gated villages (itself a phenomenon of spatial segregation), we also witness how some supposedly educated, Mass-going and rosary-reciting residents usurp upon the public domain, disregarding common space by blocking fire hydrants, street corners, and driveways, while being the first and loudest ones to complain when their own spaces are blocked by others.

But we need not look further and outside ourselves. The Nativity invites us to enter into that most sacred space, from within which alone we can take a hard look at ourselves, and see to what extent we have violated the common good by unlawfully usurping upon public space, and all because of our illusion of being the center of the world.

Simone Weil tells us that to love is “to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all the points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world.” Such love is the love that the Nativity invites us to receive.

Our spiritual life demands that we pass the social and political test of recognizing and safeguarding public space. After all, we pray that His will be done on earth as in heaven. Failing this test will only belie all claims to religiosity and spirituality, and unmask them as nothing but sheer hypocrisy.

And so as we slowly enter into the heart of Christmas, we are invited to behold the unfolding of this wondrous story that is the Nativity. It is the story of this ultimate act of displacement, when God willingly divested Himself of His divine nature, displacing Himself in order to bring everything back to its proper place.

Among the first ones to witness the unfolding of this wondrous story were those who lived in the margins, too. We must learn from them then, these shepherds. Like them we must approach the manger, quietly and without any expectation, with hearts open and ready to wait.

There, in the manger, where the true center is.