COMMENTARY: Do you see what I see?

(RNS) Want to know what Christmas is about? Go see the film “Precious,” the story of an abused teenaged girl in Harlem who finds a way out for herself and her two young children. I know the upscale critics at The New York Times and The Washington Post panned it. The Times called it “demeaning” […]

(RNS) Want to know what Christmas is about? Go see the film “Precious,” the story of an abused teenaged girl in Harlem who finds a way out for herself and her two young children.

I know the upscale critics at The New York Times and The Washington Post panned it. The Times called it “demeaning” and “the con job of the year.” The Post said it was a “film of prurient interest.” What you see depends on what you bring with you when you see it.

Don’t get me wrong. “Precious” is a rough movie, a very rough movie. It’s rated “R’ for a reason, but it’s not your garden-variety “R” movie. No one has a knife in his eye. Folks aren’t rolling around in dreamy bedroom scenes. Flaming cars aren’t plunging off overpasses.


The movie is ostensibly about poor black people in Harlem. The back story, however, is about the insidiousness of evil and the simplicity of its antidote.

Sixteen-year-old Claireece “Precious” Jones (played by Gabourey Sidibe) lives locked in a welfare world with her abusive mother (actress Mo’Nique). Precious’ young daughter is cared for by her grandmother, but the folks down at the welfare office don’t know that, and Mama gets a big check.

Raped once again by her father, Precious is pregnant. She’s put out of her public high school, but her principal tells her about an alternative school located in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa.

The message is obvious. The Hotel Theresa — once the best New York hotel in which a black person could rent a room — is where Louis Armstrong stayed, and Lena Horne, and Duke Ellington, and Sugar Ray Robinson. It was someplace. They were somebody.

Hungry for learning and just plain hungry, Precious goes to the Hotel Theresa, and the theme beats on. Scenes whiplash between her ugly home life and her ugly school life. She builds a fantasy world around her to shield her from interior and exterior welts and wounds.

But Precious plugs ahead, encouraged by her teacher and emboldened by her school friends. In the end, real live caring people convince her she is a worthwhile person, woman, and mother.


What does this have to do with Christmas? Remember the Christmas story. Whether portrayed at Radio City Music Hall, crooned by Bing Crosby, or told in churches around the world, the story line is the same. Father and pregnant mother are stranded in a hostile city, looking for a place to stay. Who cares? Who really cares about this unwed mother of this unborn child?

And then the baby comes.

Emboldened by her second motherhood, Precious learns that, in the end, it’s all about relationships. Her fractured relationships cannot undo the love she knows and feels for her tiny, helpless child. The pattern of her past cannot — and need not — dictate her future. She will not allow it.

The story has not changed in 2,000 years. Look at the news. Do you see what I see? Children are abused every day, whether in Harlem, Sao Paulo, or in East L.A.

Do you hear what I hear? Mothers beg for food and shelter, in India, in Sierra Leone, and in Somalia.

Can the simple people tell the mighty kings? Will, in fact, the princes and the potentates even listen? They must know what we know. For real and metaphorically, a child, this child, shivers in the cold. That child needs food and housing, health care and education. He — or she — needs to be loved.

One toy or check is not enough. Christmas is neither a solitary nor a short-term project. If we really see the children as the Christ come among us, we cannot stop until every one is fed and clothed, housed, educated and loved. Only then will it be Christmas for us all.


(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)

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