BRISBANE, Australia (UCAN) -- Was Christmas 2008 the same old annual fiesta in a society cringing for peace?

Modern pagans continued to downplay the religious aspect of Christmas and projected it as the yearend holiday season, while market forces accelerated the consumer carnival to drive away the blues of a worldwide recession.

The season of joy offered Uzbekistan's 500-strong baby Church an opportunity to evaluate a different experience, a traditional Polish path to evangelization. After building Central Asia's largest church, Tashkent can draw only 150 Sunday Mass goers, Samarkand only 25. With just 15 at Christmas Eve services in a Church for 150 worshippers in Bukhara, the local pastor said the Church has no future in that country unless Christians are willing to work alongside Muslims, the major religious community.

Hector Welgampola

Strangely enough, while some missioners in that land of more than 80 percent Muslims mulled over dialogue with Muslims, elsewhere in Asia the Church in the Philippines, a country of more than 80 percent Christians, engaged in such dialogue. Church leaders there spent the Christmas season pursuing their 11-year peace effort with Muslim rebels in Mindanao. Their efforts reiterated that reaching out is the essence of the Christmas peace message.

Such outreach hopefully will continue to sustain Christian-Muslim relations in India, which is reputed to be the home of the largest Muslim population in Asia. In the wake of a terror attack in Mumbai, The Times of India struck a somber note. "As we pick up the pieces," a columnist appealed, "let's come home to some loving this Christmas."

No part of India needed such "loving" more than Orissa, where alleged Hindu radicals have continuously harassed Christians. Did such a spirit of love prompt Hindus to call off the Orissa-wide strike planned for Christmas Day? Young Catholic bikers' tour of Indore archdiocese to spread the Christmas peace message could be seen as a matching response.

In Karachi, Pakistan's former capital, Archbishop Evarist Pinto led prayers for peace between his country and India. This initiative in a city prominent before the partition of India and Pakistan was an equally commendable gesture of peace. Such gestures spread hope. Christmas Eve elections in the two nations' disputed Jammu and Kashmir state showed that minorities such as Christians must be prepared for sacrifices.

It was the same elsewhere in South Asia. Election campaigns in Bangladesh and provincial council nominations in Sri Lanka somewhat marred the seasonal joy. In the latter, the call of Christian leaders for a Christmas-time cessation of fighting between the army and Tamil rebels went unheeded.

In the Philippines too, fighting between the military and Mindanao rebels continued. Christmas also saw the Filipino Church assisting families of some 50,000 workers returning home in the aftermath of the economic crisis in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea.

In South Korea's capital, Church people offered solidarity to workers sacked by a Church-run hospital, while Church groups in parts of Vietnam held blood donation camps and food donation programs for street dwellers, and Indonesian Church groups held Christmas programs to bring seasonal cheer to street kids and scavengers.

These Christmas vignettes of the joys and sorrows of Christians in parts of Asia are like facets of a mosaic. They show the living Church striving to be of service and not merely survive. Even if the mosaic is imperfect, it reveals the Church as a community unceasingly striving to be healed and made whole in and through service.

And the more the Church incarnates as a human community fearless of being scarred in service and sharing, the more it becomes like Christ.

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Hector Welgampola, a Sri Lankan journalist, was Executive Editor of UCA News from 1987 until he retired in December 2001.

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