God, save us from absolute slackness

"Behold I am coming soon." (Rev 22)

Jamaica has entered the flesh market big time. All you have to do is look at our TV ads, our newspapers, and listen to our current music. Women and even men rival to be in photo spreads, revealing all parts of their body; teenage kids are mostly shown as sex-oriented, and older men and women are mostly exhibited in photos that are sensual and exhibitionist. These photos are not of poor people, but are of popular, wealthy and vulgar newsmakers.

I find also that the newspapers are mostly visual or pictorial rather than intellectual and intelligent. The erosion of thought has brought on an inability to go deep and serious, to be contemplative, sensitive, philosophical and long-visioned. Rather than reading the classical novels and drama, we dwell on scandal; rather than poetry, there is hip talk and graffiti. We are descending into a world of sensation and a life of triviality.

Jamaica is basically a country of extraordinary beauty and loveliness; it is conductive to meditation, a sense of wonder and even mysticism. Our country is wrought by a God whose artistic hand was fully at work when He formed our island. Per square foot, there isn't a country lovelier, full of more surprises and breathtaking landscape and colours. It is a labour of God's love, and Jamaica remains a compelling sight in the eyes of everyone.

Jamaicans generally love God and want to please Him. We are a people with a moral sense, and desire respect for everyone. The carnal, materialistic, greedy and sensual principles that have swept the world is a high wind that has transformed Europe, gone to North America and down to Jamaica, and the rest of the Caribbean. Atheism has led to materialism, and materialism has led to hedonism, and hedonism is self-gratification at the exploitation of everyone else.

I have watched artists, lawyers, doctors, politicians and even religious people whose professions are meant to serve, but are now concerned mostly with profit and self-preservation.

Nurses, teachers and artists, once purveyors of God's visions and dreams for mankind, are now caught up with profit and self-interest.

Fleshly pursuit

Jamaica has declined into a state of absolute vulgarity and slackness. The holy and virtuous are absent, while those who enhance the body and pleasures have become top moneymakers. Jamaica has quickly been degraded from being a Christian culture into an island of fleshly pursuit. No more are there Afros, but blondes and redheads; no longer natural, transparent finger nails, but green, black or purple. No more men decently dressed, but three quarters naked with pants and shorts hanging way below the waist; and no longer is our skin clean and gleaming, but marked with grotesque tattoos.

Poor young men and women call themselves sufferers and come begging us for money, food, school fees and jobs - most having been born out of wedlock and their own children as teenagers also giving birth out of wedlock.

Jamaican culture based on Christian faith, which brought forth respect and kindness, has fled. Where has it gone? Our freedom of self-expression has led to absolute vulgarity, and the desire to satisfy ourselves has led us to animal kingdom. Jamaica! Jamaica! So beautiful, so innocent - will we turn back to our roots, our spirituality, and the soul of our nation - Jesus Christ, our Lord?

Father Richard Ho Lung is founder of the Missionaries of the Poor. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mopfathergeneral@missionariesofthepoor.org.