[Vnbiz] A Reflection on Christmas

[Tran Dinh Hoanh]

Dear CACC,

Christmas is only a week a way.  This is my favorite season of the year.  I
grew up within the Christmas tradition of stars, lights, colors, music, rock
cave, manager, Christmas tree, midnight mass, reveillon and, in later years,
Christmas parties.  And peace and love. "Glory to God on high, peace on
earth for man of good will."  Woman too :-)

These are all wonderful, but let me share with you some personal feeling.
Christmas is the birthday of Jesus and he is my model. There are many people
I admire, among them Siddartha and Jesus.  But I identify myself with Jesus
more. Siddarthat is too calm, too cool, too controlled for me.  Jesus, on
the other hand, is intensely passionate, intensely loving, and he is willing
to be nailed for his teaching of love.  That is the kind of guy I love to
follow.

So now that his birthday is coming, I think a bit about how significant the
birth of one of the greatest teachers of mankind is. I realize that Jesus
family was poor and that he was born poor and that the first people who were
informed of his birth were the poor shepherds in the field. That, by itself,
is very significant.  If you tell me, "Hoanh, I used to pick up garbage to
find things to recycle when I was in primary school," that would be a very
significant fact to me and you would immediately stand out in my heart.  But
if we put into the Jesus story a little religious element--that Jesus is the
Son of God as the Christian says or the prophet of God as the Muslim
says--then the point about the poor becomes one hundred times
more significant--that the Son of God has chosen to come down on earth among
the poor.

I don't believe in being poor.  I think poverty is a bad thing.  I think
prosperity is a good thing.  I believe that God, our loving father, would
prefer us to be rich rather than poor.  I believe that being prosperous in
business is a very good way to help the poor (have job). I do not believe in
poverty. I believe that poverty is a very good ground to breed diseases and
crimes.   I think poverty should be wiped out of the face of the earth.

But the fact remains that there are so many poor people in the world.  That
may be due to human stupidity, i.e., our inability to have a more equal
world, or our greed, i.e., people with power are not willing to share their
riches.  Whatever the reason is, the fact remains the same:  There are too
many poor people around us.

So in the Christmas reason, shouldn't we take a minute to think about the
poor?  Just think about them.  Being poor is never a nice thing, but
shouldn't we "come down" among the poor once in awhile, so that our
heart will steer us into doing business, doing politics, doing economics,
doing education in a way that may benefit some of the poor out there?  Then
maybe some day God will no longer see the need to send a daughter down to
get our attention about the poor.

Let's try to be rich while not forgettng our poor.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Hoanh

-- 
Tran Dinh Hoanh, LLB, JD
Attorney of Law
Washington DC
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