Opinion: The wink of a star

Star in the night sky. Pixabay
Published: 12-21-2024 8:00 AM |
As a staff member of the Illinois United Church of Christ Conference, John Buttrick led delegations to Chiapas, Mexico as guests of the Catholic Bishop of San Cristobal. John writes from his Vermont Folk Rocker in his Concord home, Minds Crossing.
We arrive at dusk. We are a small delegation from Illinois Maya Ministries visiting a refugee camp of Guatemalans in Chiapas, Mexico.
People scattered throughout the camp cautiously move toward us. Soon, smiling men and children cluster around us with welcoming handshakes. The women dart back and forth, preparing the evening meal before night settles on the hosts and their guests.
The men usher us into the community building, where dusk has already become darkness. The orange glowing filament of a single light bulb doesn’t even provide enough light to cast a shadow. We move tentatively through the gloom, guided to a row of chairs.
We sit behind a table facing sixty indistinct shapes of men and children crowded on rows of benches in the dark. For two hours, one man after another appears under the bare lightbulb to tell his story: loved ones tortured and killed, whole villages of people massacred, houses and fields burned, escape from Guatemala past shooting military and paramilitary guns, fifteen years in the refugee camp.
Each story is filled with pain swirling through the darkness: pain of grief, pain of fear, pain of powerlessness, pain of remembering. At the end of these testimonies, we are escorted to a table laden with the evening meal. After the meal, we are directed to a small building containing straw mats spread across the floor. We each choose a mat and settle down to sleep.
However, for me sleep is elusive. I’m haunted by those earlier painful words of our hosts. They rattle around in my head like a frenzy of cats chasing a mouse.
It’s three a.m. when my sleeplessness finally drives me outside where I hope to quiet those persistent voices. The moon is bright, shining on the collection of wood-framed huts, each serving as a bedroom for eight or more family members – in the morning to be transformed into a kitchen to cook a day’s supply of tortillas, later to be a storeroom for possessions and a shelter on stormy days.
Article continues after...
Yesterday's Most Read Articles
The sight of those rude huts corroborates the refugees’ stories. Soon the setting moon drops over the edge of the horizon. I’m left feeling totally alone in the dark – the refugees’ huts are now out of sight. Yet, the pain-filled stories still wash over me in the sound of the silent night, like the cold damp dew penetrating my thin jacket. I shiver in despair.
Until, from one of those invisible refugee dwellings, a baby cries. At the same time, I notice in the moonless sky, filled with countless winking stars, an earth-launched satellite moving slowly across the constellations. It is still faintly visible in the distance when a streak of a star shoots across the sky exhausting its billion years of stored energy in an instant of brilliance. The baby’s crying stops.
I wonder, how many see the two lights passing: one cast by human hand, one cast by the hand of God. In dark Bethlehem two thousand years ago, and every so often since, a flash of a star blesses a child or perhaps leads an immigrant, the hungry, the homeless, or the marginalized to a place of hope.
This night I have seen the star traverse the sky, blessing refugee and baby. Back on my straw mat in our drafty sleeping quarters, I fall into a dreamless peaceful sleep, until the cock crows.
During this season of giving and receiving, of joy and sorrow, of carols and stars, look up and see the wink of a star: “Peace on earth and goodwill to humankind.”