Hanging up a star

“What are you looking for? the wife asked as we rummaged through the storeroom. “A star,” we said. “The Christmas star.”

Tomorrow is the first of four Advent Sundays, the liturgical run-up to Christmas. Our belen or Nativity crib is lighted. The battered Christmas tree is decked.   Purple and white candles stud an Advent wreath. “But where’s the star?” our grandkids will ask.

“We saw his star rise in the east and come to honor him,” travel-weary men, of regal bearing told the paranoid Herod. “(Then) the star …went ahead of them and stopped over the place where the Child was…with Mary his mother.”

Even today, the Christmas star puzzles scientists. Was it a supernova or a comet? ask Dr. Peter Andrews at  University of Cambridge and Robert Massey, of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. A “stationary point of Jupiter” perhaps?

“In the year 5 BC, when many scholars believe Jesus was born, a combination of a bright nova and a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, in the constellation of Pisces, was seen,” some accounts say. “Ancient Chinese astronomers recorded this as an unusually bright star that appeared in the eastern sky for 70 days.  It was a rare sight.”

“None of possible astronomical explanation has overwhelming evidence that it should be preferred to others,” Drs. Andrew and Massey conclude. But the nova, comet or variable star explanation “appears more likely.”

The astronomers’ debate continues. So does the puzzle over  a  vulnerable child  who lighted a world, though  born  in a  manger,  that  clones  our  2011  slums.

Poverty  that  hobbles adults is vastly different from  indigence that  chokes off  the  sparkle  in children, says  United Nations Children Fund  in  a new study.  Released this week,  “Child Poverty in East Asia and the Pacific: Deprivations and Disparities” analyzes 2007 to 2010  data  from  the Philippines  and  six other  countries of this region.

The worldwide UNICEF  analysis  sifts thru  the plight of  93 million  kids in 53  countries   Look  beyond  traditional  measuring  gauges, like family income, it suggests   A  starker portrait of penury in youngsters  then emerges. 

Over 30 million kids agonize from at least one form of severe deprivation, e.g.  lack of  basic health care, adequate food , safe drinking water or a sanitary toilet. More than 13 million are afflicted by  two or more forms  of  extreme scarcity that  interlock.

Child destitution was 130 per cent higher in rural Philippines than in urban areas – a feature shared by Thailand and Cambodia.  The number of impoverished ethnic minority Filipino children like “lumads” was nine times higher than those of dominant ethnic groups. “This is an issue in most countries surveyed.”

(“Lumad leaders… have little faith in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front or government protecting their interests” in the current peace talks on Mindanao, the International Crisis Group in Jakarta said this week, “They are worried because they are not at the negotiating table….

("Fear of losing land rights is the primary reason some ‘lumads’   reject the idea of a Bangsamoro homeland, with expanded territory and powers, as demanded by the MILF,” says Bryony Lau, Crisis Group's South East Asia analyst. Government and MILF were prodded "o secure  “lumad”   support for the peace process.”)

Severe deprivation more than doubled in households where the head had only a primary-school education, UNICEF says. In Mongolia and Viet Nam, incidence of severe deprivation almost doubled in households with more than seven members, compared to those with four or fewer. That pattern persists in the Philippines and Thailand. “Income gains of middle income countries in the region, didn’t  translate  into gains for all children.”)

The gauntlet that a child runs  extends beyond  early years.  Davao death  squads copycat Brazil’s  vigilante slaying  of street children  in the 1990s. They have targetted kids with records for petty crime.

“If you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination,” then Mayor Rodrigo Duterte  told  David McNeill of the U.K.” Independent”. Under daughter Mayor Sara Duterte, those who object  get the “dirty finger“ drill.

Halina  Hesus  and save  us  from the terror  and all the hells we  create for our selves we’ve begged  Advent after Advent,  Catalino Arevalo of  Loyola House of  Studies  wrote . “And we believe that he came in answer to our asking."

“And yet, things haven’t really changed. In  fact, it seems things have gone from bad to worse:  brothers killing brothers in  Basilan” (the Maguindanao slaughter, desaparecidos Redemptorist Father Rudy Romero, activist Jonas Burgos, unsolved murders by  Cebu vigilantes  to  ill-fed mothers whose wizened babies start dying at birth.) 

In the Christmas Infant, God has come to enter into our own life stories, Fr. Arevalo adds.  “Emmanuel means God is with us". Save for our transgressions, there is nothing more in human life, joy, pain and even dying that God is in it also. ‘There are no more unvisited places in our lives.’

This point is also reflected in a Christmas 1937 poem titled: “Juan Hangs Up A Star.” A 20-year-old Horacio de la Costa, who became a historian and first Filipino superior of Philippine Jesuits, wrote:

“For my house is thatched, and is leaky,/  There, Lady: the humble of heart / .Poor men like the shepherds that sought Him/  In Bethlehem far /   Shall kneel round Him again; and my window/  Shall have a Star.”*

(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com)

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