Christmas ကုိဘာျဖစ္လုိ ့ X'mas လုိ ့ေရးၾကတာလဲ?

ခရစ္ေတာ္ဘုရားရဲ ့ေမြးေန ့ေတာ္အခါသမယမွာ၊ ၀မ္းေျမာက္ေပ်ာ္ရြွင္ျခင္းမ်ားနဲ ့၊ ႏွဳတ္ခြန္း ဆက္လြွာေတြ၊ ပုိ ့စ္ကဒ္ေတြ၊ ပုိ ့ ၾက၊ေရးၾကနဲ ့အလြန္ၾကည္ႏူး ဘြယ္ေကာင္းပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့စိတ္ထဲမွာ၊ မေပ်ာ္ႏုိင္တာတစ္ခုက၊ Christmas ကုိ X’mas လုိ ့ေရးၾကတ့ဲ အေၾကာင္းေလးပါ။ ေရးၾကတ့ဲသူကုိအျပစ္တင္တာေတာ့မဟုတ္ပါဘူး၊ ခံစားခ်က္ေလးကုိ ေ၀မွ်တာပါ။ ငယ္ ငယ္ကကြ်န္ေတာ္လဲ၊ ေရးခ့ဲဘူး ပါတယ္၊ အဲဒီတုံးကေတာ့၊ စာလုံးေလးအထူး အဆန္းဆုိျပီး ေရးခ့ဲတာပါ။ အခုေတာ့မေရး ေတာ့ပါဘူး၊ တမင္ကုိမေရးေတာ့တာပါ၊ ေရးရင္စိတ္ထဲမွာမေပ်ာ္လုိ ့။ ကုိယ္မေရးလဲသူမ်ားေတြေရးေနတာျမင္ရေတာ့လဲ ဒီခံစားရခ်က္ေတြေပၚေပၚလါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္၊ ခံစားခ်က္ေလးကုိေ၀မွ်လုိက္တာပါ။

Christmas ကုိ X’mas လုိ ့ေရးၾကတ့ဲသူမ်ားရဲ ့အေၾကာင္းရင္းကုိေလ့လါေတာ့၊ အမ်ဴိးမ်ိဴးေတြ ့ရပါတယ္။ ”အတုိေကာက္” ေရးတာပါတ့ဲ၊ တခ်ဴိ ့က ”ဂရိစာမွာ Christ ကုိ Xp နဲ ့စလုိ ့” Christmas=X’mas, Christian=Xtian=Xtianity” လုိ ့ သုံးၾကတာပါတ့ဲ၊ အမ်ဴိးမ်ဴိးပါဘဲ။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ကသခ်ာၤေမဂ်ာယူခ့ဲေတာ့၊ X ကုိျမင္ရင္ ”မသိကိန္း”ဘဲေခါင္းထဲ၀င္လါပါတယ္။ မသိတ့ဲကိန္း၊ မသိတ့ဲသူ၊ မသိခ်င္တ့ဲအရာ၊ မသိေစခ်င္တ့ဲအရာေတြကုိ၊ ၾကက္ေျခခတ္ (X) လုိ ့ေရးၾကတယ္မဟုတ္လါး။ ၁၉၇၇ ခုႏွစ္က အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံ၊နယူးဟမ္းရွဳိင္းယားက၊ ျမဳိ ့ေတာ္၀န္ Meldrim Thomson ေျပာတာက၊ X’mas လုိ ့ ေရးတာဟာ၊ ခရစ္ ယာန္မဟုတ္သူေတြေရးတ့ဲခရစ္စမတ္ပါ၊ တ့ဲ။ မိတ္ေဆြေတာ့မသိဘူး၊က်ြန္ေတာ္ကလက္ခံတယ္။

Christmas မွာခရစ္ေတာ္ကုိေဖ်ာက္ျပီး၊မသိကိန္း (ၾကက္ေျခခတ္) ကုိထည့္သုံးျခင္းဟာ၊ခရစ္ယာန္မ်ားသုံးသင့္တ့ဲ အကၡရာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး၊ Franklin Graham ေျပာတာက၊ ”ဒါဟာ၊ခရစ္ေတာ္ရဲ ့နာမေတာ္နဲ ့ဆုိင္တ့ဲစစ္ပြဲၾကီးျဖစ္တယ္၊ ခရစ္ယာန္ မ်ားရဲ ့အျမင့္ျမတ္ဆုံးေသာပြဲေတာ္မွာ၊ ျမင့္ျမတ္တ့ဲခရစ္ေတာ္ရဲ ့နာမေတာ္ကုိေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ အစားထုိး ျပစ္တာျဖစ္တယ္”။ ခရစ္ေတာ္ေယရွဳ ဘုရားရဲ ့နာမေတာ္ကုိ၊ ”ခရစ္စမတ္မွာေရာ၊ ခရစ္ယာန္”မွာပါႏွဳတ္ယူ၊ အစားထုိးလုိ ့မရႏုိင္ပါဘူး၊ မယုံၾကည္ သူမ်ားကုိေတာင္ ”ေက်းဇူးျပဳျပီးမသုံးပါနဲ ့” လုိေျပာရမ့ဲအစား ကုိယ္တုိင္က၊ခုံခုံမင္မင္သုံး ေနၾကျခင္းဟာမသင့္ ေတာ္ဘူးလုိ ့၊ ခံစားမိတာပါ။

အခုေခတ္မွာ၊ခရစ္ေတာ္ကုိအစားထုိးေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ျခင္းနဲ ့ခရစ္ယာန္မ်ားကုိတုိက္ခုိက္ေနတ့ဲအခ်ိန္ ျဖစ္တယ္။ Merry Christmas ကုိ Happy Holidays လုိ ့သုံးရမယ္၊နိပါတ္ေတာ္စဥ္ပန္းခ်ီကားအရုပ္မ်ားလူျမင္ကြင္းမွာမထားရဘူးလုိ ့၊တခ်ဴိ ့ အလုပ္ေတြမွာ၊ စတုိးဆုိင္ ၾကီးေတြမွာ၊တခ်ဴိ ့ရုံးေတြမွာသတ္မွတ္ လါၾကတယ္။ခရစ္ေတာ္ ေၾကာင့္ စတုိးဆုိင္ မ်ား ေကာင္းၾကီး အၾကီးအက်ယ္ ခံစားရေပမ့ဲ၊ ခရစ္ေတာ္ရဲ ့နာမေတာ္ကုိေတာ္ ေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ခ်င္ၾကတယ္။ ၀မ္းနည္းစရာပါ။ ခရစ္ေတာ္ ေၾကာင့္၊ အျပစ္လြတ္ျခင္း၊ ငရဲမွလြတ္ ျခင္း၊ ဘုရားရွင္ရဲ ့အမ်က္ေတာ္မွ လြတ္ျခင္း၊ ဆုိတ့ဲကယ္တင္ ေတာ္မူျခင္း ေက်းဇူး ေတာ္ကုိခံစား ရျပီးမွ၊ ခရစ္ေတာ္ရဲ ့နာမေတာ္ ကုိေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ အစားထုိးတ့ဲ၊ အေရးအသား ေတာ့မျပဳသင့္ပါဘူး။ ၾကက္ေျခခတ္ (X)ဟာခရစ္ေတာ္ ေနရာယူ လါတာေတြ၊ ဆန္တာကေလာ့၊ ကခရစ္စမတ္မွာ၊ ခရစ္ေတာ္ ဘုရားထက္အေရးၾကီး ေနရာ၀င္လါတာေတြ၊ ခရစ္ေတာ္ မပါတ့ဲခရစ္စမတ္ ပါတီေတြ၊ဟာေပ်ာ္ၾက ေပမ့ဲအႏွစ္သာရ မျပည့္၀ၾကပါဘူး။ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmas မွာလဲဒီအေၾကာင္း ေရးထားတာေတြ ့ရတယ္၊ပုိသိခ်င္ရင္ သြားဖတ္ၾကည့္ပါ။

က်ြန္ေတာ္ရဲ ့ခံစားခ်က္ကုိေ၀မွ်လုိက္တာပါ။ ခံစားခ်က္ခ်င္းမတူညီ ဘူးဆုိရင္လည္းကိစၥမရွိပါဘူး၊ တူညီတယ္ ဆုိရင္ေတာ့၊ ကယ္တင္ရွင္ ေယရွဳသခင္ရဲ ့နာမေတာ္အတြက္မားမားမတ္မတ္ရပ္တည္ရင္း အတူတုိက္ပြဲ၀င္ဖုိ ့၊ေမတၱာရပ္ခံပါတယ္။

ေမတၱာမ်ားျဖင့္၊

ခရစ္ေတာ္၏ျမတ္ေသာနာမေတာ္ျမတ္၌

လတ္ေယရွဲ (ဒီဇင္ဘာ၊၂၀၁၀)

The Shoemaker's Christmas

There once lived in the city of Marseilles an old shoemaker, loved and honored by his neighbors, who affectionately called him “Father Martin”

One Christmas Eve, as he sat alone in his little shop reading of the visit of the Wise Men to the infant Jesus, and of the gifts they brought, he said to himself. “If tomorrow were the first Christmas, and if Jesus were to be born in Marseilles this night, I know what I would give Him!” He rose from his stool and took from a shelf overhead two tiny shoes of softest snow- white leather, with bright silver buckles. “I would give Him those, my finest work.”

Replacing the shoes, he blew out the candle and retired to rest. Hardly had he closed his eyes, it seemed, when he heard a voice call his name…”Martin! Martin!”

Intuitively he felt a presence. Then the voice spoke again…”Martin, you have wished to see Me. Tomorrow I shall pass by your window. If you see Me, and bid Me enter, I shall be your guest at your table.”

Father Martin did not sleep that night for joy. And before it was yet dawn he rose and swept and tidied up his little shop. He spread fresh sand upon the floor, and wreathed green boughs of fir along the rafters. On the spotless linen-covered table he placed a loaf of white bread, a jar of honey, and a pitcher of milk, and over the fire he hung a pot of tea Then he took up his patient vigil at the window.

Presently he saw an old street-sweeper pass by, blowing upon his thin, gnarled hands to warm them. “Poor fellow, he must be half frozen,” thought Martin. Opening the door he called out to him, “Come in, my friend, and warm, and drink a cup of hot tea.” And the man gratefully accepted the invitation.

An hour passed, and Martin saw a young, miserably clothed women carrying a baby. She paused wearily to rest in the shelter of his doorway. The heart of the old cobbler was touched. Quickly he flung open the door.

“Come in and warm while you rest,” he said to her. “You do not look well,” he remarked.

“I am going to the hospital. I hope they will take me in, and my baby boy,” she explained. “My husband is at sea, and I am ill, without a soul.”

“Poor child!” cried Father Martin. “You must eat something while you are getting warm. No, Then let me give a cup of milk to the little one. Ah! What a bright, pretty fellow he is! Why, you have put no shoes on him!”

“I have no shoes for him,” sighed the mother sadly. “Then he shall have this lovely pair I finished yesterday.” And Father Martin took down from the shelf the soft little snow-white shoes he had admired the evening before. He slipped them on the child’s feet…they fit perfectly. And shortly the poor young mother left, two shoes in her hand and tearful with gratitude.

And Father Martin resumed his post at the window. Hour after hour went by, and although many people passed his window, and many needy souls shared his hospitality, the expected Guest did not appear.

“It was only a dream,” he sighed, with a heavy heart. “I did not believe; but he has not come.”

Suddenly, so it seemed to his weary eyes, the room was flooded with a strange light. And to the cobbler’s astonished vision there appeared before him, one by one, the poor street-sweeper, the sick mother and her child, and all the people whom he had aided during the day. And each smiled at him and said. “Have you not seen me? Did I not sit at your table?” Then they vanished.

At last, out of the silence, Father Martin heard again the gentle voice repeating the old familiar words. “Whosoever shall receive one such in My name, receiveth Me…for I was an hungered, and ye gave Me meat; I was athirst, and ye gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took Me in…verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto Me.”