As Christmas approaches this year, with all the attention on the refugees and asylum seekers piling up at the U.S.-Mexico border, my thoughts turn to an earlier time. They go back to the December I visited a refugee camp near San Lorenzo, Chiapas, Mexico.

At the invitation of the bishop of San Cristobal, we were a group of people from Illinois invited to spend a week with Central American indigenous people, some with homes in Mexico and others living as refugees from Guatemala.

We arrived at the refugee camp in early evening. People slowly materialized from the perimeter of the refugee camp. Smiling men and children clustered around with welcoming handshakes. The women darted back and forth preparing the evening meal in a race against nightfall. We were invited into the community building containing a single overhead light bulb. The weak orange glow of its filament persevered against the smothering darkness.

We were six guests directed to sit behind a table facing 60 dim silhouettes of men and children crowded on rows of benches. One after another, shadowy specters stood up to tell their stories: loved ones tortured and killed, whole villages of people massacred, houses and fields burned, escape to Mexico through Guatemalan military and paramilitary gunfire, 15 years in a refugee camp. Each story was punctuated with pain flung into the darkness: pain of grief, pain of fear, pain of powerlessness, pain of remembering.

Later, in the dark hour after midnight, I found myself standing alone and sleepless outside the community building, haunted by these painful stories. I looked across a moonlit yard to clusters of one-room dirt floor buildings, each a bedroom for eight or more sleeping people. Later the bedroom would become a kitchen to cook a day’s supply of tortillas, a storeroom for possessions and a shelter on stormy days. As the moon set, the buildings faded into the darkness, abandoning me to the memory of those desperate voices weeping from the community building behind me. Their persistent pain clung to me like dew. I shivered.

From one of the rough-hewn buildings, a baby cried.

As I looked into the sky, innumerable stars materialized in the unfathomable immensity of deep space. The flickering display of countless constellations defied the dark despair in the refugee camp below. Suddenly, an earth-launched satellite interrupted this dance of the stars. Its trajectory from horizon to horizon boasted of humanity’s mighty power. But then, just as suddenly, as if laughing at humanity’s self-importance, a new star shot across the sky, displaying a billion years of stored energy in a sprinting burst of brilliance. With a gasp, the baby’s crying ceased.

I wonder how many others saw the two lights passing: one cast by human hand and one by the hand of God. It seems, in dark Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago and every so often since, the wink of a star dances out of the cosmos to calm a baby’s cry and challenge the pain of empire with a blessing of the poor, the refugee and the outcast.

Back on my straw mat in a drafty outbuilding in a refugee camp near San Lorenzo, Mexico, I slept like a baby – until the cock crowed.

Today I hear again the wake-up call of that crowing rooster. It declares there is no denying the continuing painful struggles of refugees and asylum seekers. The borders have changed; the stories of death and torture, abuse and poverty have not. Nor has the power of empires and the self-importance of supremacists changed. Like a full moon, they blur the hope displayed in the promise of the stars.

This December, take time to look behind the moonlight into the cosmos of creation to choose between the arrogance of the blinking satellite and the blessed energy of the cosmic shooting star. The possibilities for breaking down walls, initiating peace with justice, and embracing the humanity of hospitality are witnessed in the shimmering of stars proclaiming hope.

The refugee and the asylum seeker, the impoverished and the oppressed, need our accompaniment. Perhaps this may be the year that stars reflected in the brilliant lights of Hanukkah, Christmas and Kwanzaa will startle and still the cry of the rejected child.

“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:5, NRSV)

“When they saw the star … they were overwhelmed with joy.” (Mathew 2: 10, NRSV)

(The Rev. John Buttrick, United Church of Christ, lives in Concord.)