Throughout the year, the weak and the voiceless have begged the powerful for help. If Christmas is about anything, it is about the voiceless, the weak. For 2016 – will we listen? Will we have faith in our own humanity?
A girl pleaded with the United Nations that her and many like her had been raped and violated and beaten and tortured by ISIS. She begged the powerful nations of the world to help, to ‘wipe them out’.
A Syrian refugee father whose wife and children died as they crossed a sea to safe Europe begged for a home, but nothing in Europe would be home without his family, and so he returned to Syria.
German’s leader Chancellor Merkel became Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ for her country’s generosity in accepting refugees – someone at least remembering that Christmas is about a Middle Eastern couple looking for a home, for themselves and their child – Jesus.
All the while an American man, who wants to be President of the most powerful and wealth nation in history said he would stop entry into his country to all Muslims.
He was followed by an Indian Immigrant to that country, Bobby Jindal, who also wanted to be President said he wanted in that nation of immigrants in his State, Louisiana, founded by immigrants, to stop all immigrant refugees entering it – even though he is an immigrant.
2015 brought hatred of man against man and against woman and child. Hate is a stronger emotion than love.
Little wonder the poet AE Housman seeing the woes of the world challenged Jesus Himself with the words “If in that Syrian garden, ages slain, You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain, Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night The hate you died to quench and could but fan, Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.
But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by, At the right hand of majesty on high You sit, and sitting so remember yet Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat, Your cross and passion and the life you gave, Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.”
Let us not lose our faith in humanity, even if we lose it in God …at times.
Alpesh Patel
