Tag Archives: Christmas

Crèche-ing Poverty: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Dec

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning―not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. Frederick Buechner

The hinge of history is on the door of a Bethlehem stable. Ralph W. Sockman

The Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. J.I. Packer

I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. Charles Dickens

How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, His precepts! O! ’tis easier to keep holidays than commandments. Benjamin Franklin

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home. G.K. Chesterton

Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ comes uninvited. Thomas Merton

The photo above comes via an exhibit in Barcelona wherein artists attempted to adjust the iconic crèche of Christmas to modern circumstances.  It was well worth the effort. 

For indeed in our time that scene of hay and barn animals and a baby born into conditions which belie a painful truth about poverty and divinity – that scene has been sanitized and sentimentalized to such a degree that we can barely feel the winter draft, let alone the uncertainty and even peril which must surely have punctuated the scene as much as the smell of livestock and the laughter of those more fortunate beings able to party indoors near enough to a roaring fire.

The artist gets it right, in my view.  Three members of a modern-looking family huddled amidst the rubble of perhaps what was left of their home, perhaps in the ruins of one of the few structures in the area which still had something approximating a functioning roof. 

And from which places might this scene have been inspired?  In Gaza surely.  Or maybe in rural Myanmar.  Or perhaps Port-au-Prince.  Possibly areas of Yemen or Central African Republic which have yet to accept the messaging regarding pathways to peace.  Or perhaps in Darfur where people cannot currently count on any manner of shelter whatsoever from the endless betrayals, violent attacks and other miseries which daily batter their weary (and often displaced) lives?

So much ruin.  So many seeking refuge in whatever makeshift shelter they can manage to find.  So many holding out hope represented by the manger child but more immediately seeking secure-sufficient places for their own and perhaps others of the many threatened children of holy promise now among us.

Such security isn’t too much to ask, is it? Not too much to ask that we in our Christmas-obsessed traditions who purport to be redeemed by the birth of a child should commit more to the well-being of other children, the children who will never be idolized in crèche scenes but who nevertheless suffer the crushing poverty, the hunger and cold, the veritable stench of a world which has in all but rhetorically abandoned them and allowed their own God-given potential to be stifled if not altogether snuffed out.

At the UN and despite wholehearted efforts by Secretariat officials, numerous governments like Malta and Sierra Leone and diverse civil society leadership from advocates like Jo Becker and Lois Whitman, the plight of children remains precarious at best and criminally negligent at worst.  I’ll spare you the stories and the moral outrage which tends to follow in their wake, but most who bother to read this will recognize that in so many global settings at this very moment, children are being used as target practice, as economic lifelines for otherwise impoverished families, as fighters in armed struggles about which they understand little, as the unwelcome means to satisfy adult urges, and so much more that bear little or no relationship to any conceivable, positive trajectory of intellectual, physical or spiritual growth. 

That children are as resilient as they often appear to be is surely no excuse for our collective failure to honor them in every home and community, honor with even a fraction of the protection, wonder and appreciation which is due the baby in the manger, to recognize as we often do not that the “hinge of history” attributable to that child in Bethlehem is, in some more modest but discernable fashion, attributable to all. At core level, by failing to honor the “hinge” that represents the promise of all children, we have allowed the “hinge” of the manger child and his impact to corrode as well. In the theology with which I am most familiar, the incarnation event focused on a Christmas manger cannot, should not be conceived as a one off but as a flow-through, the power of the manger extended to all who enter this world in hope and promise.

I won’t go on about this much longer.  At this time, you have people to hug, presents to open and food to prepare. But just a word about the degree of difficulty of keeping Christmas in our hearts year-round, keeping it as something more potent than a sentimental attachment to a holiday, but more as a call to use our hearts, brains and courage to create safe passage for all God’s people, for all God’s children. It is that passage which is sorely lacking for millions of children, thereby exposing our season of incarnation as more sentiment than fidelity — fidelity to precepts and commandments that we mostly engage only episodically, often when crises in our lives occur that remind us of our relative frailty and dependency, characteristics that we share in common with the children we are responsible for whether we fully assume that responsibility or not.

What seems like a very long time ago, I sat regularly in a conference room at UNICEF in New York, part of a committee to assess and recommend principles for what became the Convention on the Rights of the Child, now the most frequently ratified of all UN treaty obligations. But for all that energy and all that diplomatic consensus, it is clear that, where children are concerned, we are still far from home, far from ensuring a world fit for for nurturing and enabling young lives, far from extending the reverence for the manger child to those other vessels of divinity on a planet which some of us at least continue to believe has been redeemed, even if it so often feels like something considerably less than that.

Beyond the lights and gift-giving, beyond the holiday parties and TV specials, we can live out the promise of a helpless, shivering baby and his impoverished earthly family for more than a season. The children in our midst, the inheritors of a holy baby in an unholy manger, need more consistent care and vigilance from us, a gift worthy of the crèche we now reverence.

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Storm Tracker: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Dec
Winter storm puts millions under alerts coast-to-coast as record-low ...

Mercury

You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.  Dejan Stojanovic

Once they’ve rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.  Kouta Hirano

So long awaited that its coming was a shock.  Mohsin Hamid

One who is fed on promises feeds from an empty bowl.  Marsha Hinds

For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.  Françoise Sagan

You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.  Dejan Stojanovic

It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough.  Charles H. Spurgeon

It is Christmas Eve morning in a deceptively-sunny New York.   Deceptive in that the temperature is 7 degrees F, the winds are howling through windows that leak more than a typical Congressional aide and that have so far resisted all my efforts to tape their edges. The heat now comes on and off and the ‘hot” water is tepid at best.

I am blessed.

Blessed because there is oatmeal and apple in the house. Blessed because we were able to track the impending blast from an unstable Arctic and had some time to prepare.  Blessed because I am not sitting in an airport after a long night of searching for food and explaining to increasingly unsettled children why they might not make it to grandma’s house after all.  Blessed because the leaks in my home, much like the leaks in my life, are much more likely to be plugged than those who will face another holiday in prison or trying to steal some rest in the far corner of an empty subway platform.

Blessed because I did not have to spend an icy night tending to a newborn child in a barn.

But as in years past, despite our endless predispositions to violence, our ever-hardening hearts and our well-practiced capacity to look away from the storms we well have the capacity to track, the newborn child comes as “light and dream;” as a reminder that the life we have built is not necessarily the life to which we are now called; that the storms which we face – and the storms we make – are still within our remedial range; that the promise of that birth is not just another “empty bowl” but rather as grace to as Stevie Nicks once wrote, to allow the “child in our hearts to rise above,” such that we might “handle the seasons” of our lives” with greater generosity and dignity, with a firm gratitude for blessings that can survive the cold and all the other storms with which we are currently afflicted, blessings as represented in that manger which we pretend to anticipate each and every Christmas year but which somehow still come to us as a shock.

As most of you know, we are still engaged on a regular basis at the United Nations, though this past year of access has made us wonder a bit about our value, real and perceived.  While change at the UN can be even more glacial than waiting for teenagers to vacate a single family bathroom, we have witnessed some shifts in attitude – a growing sense that a UN which has been too much about promises as “empty bowls,” anticipating storms with considerable skill but then playing politics with responses which do not take seriously the expectations of constituents, that UN is increasingly incarnating a practical recognition that forecasts must be accompanied by active preparations and, when needed, emergency accompaniment.  More and more, whether on biodiversity protection, poverty reduction in the Sahel, online hate speech or gang violence in Haiti, UN agencies and their leadership are genuinely starting to “fill the bowls” with tangibility, with something more than endless rhetorical aspiration, condemnations which have long-lost their impact, or emergency provisions from often-remarkably dedicated humanitarians mostly accessible only after some of the proverbial horses have already left the stable. 

Especially during this holy season, I often wonder what exactly is wrong with us, is wrong with me? Do we truly lament that “we cannot love enough?” And if so, what do we do about that?  What’s our plan to energize that skill? And what are the signposts indicating that we are making progress on perhaps this most essential of human attributes, signs that we are truly commited to caring beyond our current capacities, loving better despite ourselves, pushing harder to balance the world in lieu of some of our modest, even petty personal aspirations?

Those of you who regularly consume these posts (I feel for you) recognize the predisposition to equate loving with attentiveness and discernment.  Despite my own limitations, I remain firmly committed to the task both philosophical and practical set out by my graduate school mentor Maxine Greene who hopefully suggested that “we want ourselves to break through some of the crusts of convention, the distortions of fetishism, the sour tastes of narrow faith.” Such “crusts” and “distortions” simply have no place in institutions devoted to the care of human souls nor other aspects of the global public good in a time of intersecting crises.  Such “narrow faith” has no place in a season calling us to “fill the bowls” with goodness and mercy; calling us to resolutely discern the times and supercharge our attentiveness; calling us to eschew any and all forms of resignation and be the light that a shivering child in a manger gave us sanction to be.

The temperature outside has risen to 9 degrees.  The water in the sink is getting warmer.  The winds are still compromising what passes for apartment windows, but now more like a knife through hard cheese than soft butter.  And the baby in the barn is calling out to us once again to be that light unto the world, to be the dreamers who can flip our global storms into fresh and sustainable possibilities for future generations of humans and the species on which our very lives depend. 

We can do this.   Happy Christmas.

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Muscle Pain: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Dec
See the source image

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.  bell hooks

All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.  Charlotte Brontë

Your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness.  William Shakespeare

An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.  Ayn Rand

Everything precious was also vulnerable.  Mary H.K. Choi

While most of us are, at some level, guilty of creating what some scribes and religious texts refer to as “graven images” of deeper and more challenging spiritual realities, our imaging has taken a particularly sinister turn as this season of Advent transitions into the season of the Christmas manger.

Many have seen for ourselves images of smiling elected officials and others sitting around Christmas trees while holding deadly weapons and asking Santa for suitable ammunition. We have also heard preachers, not always from obscure denominational backgrounds, urging a brand of “godly” violence in an effort, or so it seems, to drag an otherwise disredited version of Christianity out of the shadows and on to the pedestal of governance. It is as though we never abandoned the aspiration of “holy empire” nor ceased to honor the (mostly) men who perpetuated it.

Putting forth a notion of a “muscular Jesus” is not a new phenomenon in our culture, but in some circles it is clearly poised to make some fresh noise.  An article this week in the Washington Post by Peter Manseau cited the desire in some “Christian” quarters for a “viral and manly Jesus” on the basis of which weapons and other threats of force can be justified, necessary to the “preservation of the good,” including the good of restoring a more testosterone-laden version of Christianity which, as they see it, had been allowed (by liberals mostly) to get too soft, too gentle, too “feminine” as it were.

This relishing of muscular force as a global (and even religious) good has a long and checkered past.  While taking a break from weekly posts, I came upon a commentary on the iconic “Iliad” by the illustrious Simone Weil, one in which she reminds us of the deeper truths embedded in that seminal work, truths about ourselves including our almost genetic obsession with violence and its justifications.  As she navigates the text, she is clear throughout that the “center of the Iliad is force,” force that enslaves, force before which our “flesh shrinks away,” force which “turns anybody subjected to it into a thing,” in essence making “corpses” of all of us.

This is sobering reflection, made more so by the accuracy of its portrayal.   As a species we have long been addicted to the allure of force, which includes the assumption (until proven otherwise) that our choices are only between the projection of force and its receipt, that we have little recourse in this life aside from being on one end of a weapon or another, creating things out of people or, alternatively, enduring the experience of being turned into things by others.

This dystopian view generates plenty of supporting evidence, and we often seem surprised by how shallow are our collective alternatives, our practical commitments to the values of peace, dignity, compassion and tolerance. Weil notes that in the Iliad there are moments of grace to be found, but these are often buried along with the corpses of those fallen in battle or through siege, signaling the likelihood that the cycles of violence to which we have become all-too-accustomed are poised to flare up yet again.

And yet amidst the pain and carnage of our weapons and muscular mindsets, a child is born, a son is given, a manger barely fit for livestock has become the stage for a different way of engaging the world, one less involved in pumping iron and packing heat, and more interested in demonstrating that, even in this force-addicted world, another more peaceful course forward is possible.

The manger, after all, is more than a humble birthing location; it is a metaphor for what is to come: a life spent bringing dignity to outcasts who might otherwise have been ignored; a life bearing forgiveness in settings where many of us would likely succumb to bitterness; a life showering compassion on the sick and hungry beyond the influence of any comfort zone; a life rejecting the very violence and self-reference which some in his name would have you believe is a core component of a proper, “manly” faith.  We hear the testimony of that divine life: Give him your cloak as well.  Put away your sword.  Cease your elbowing for honor and recognition. Understand that the ways of the world – embracing the coerciveness of muscular force – will not be your way, must not be your way if we are to have a way forward at all.  

That same manger also sends a message to those who fear above all their own vulnerability and insufficiency, who measure strength by their ability to coerce others and even make them beg for mercy, who seek to double down on the terms of the current world rather than the terms which the ministry of Jesus embodies, a message that there is grace, dignity and forgiveness to be found emanating from the most extreme and forlorn places, even from a barn at the edge of town on a bone chilling night.

The late senior pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, William Sloane Coffin, used to speak of the essential Christmas choice as one between “shoving and loving.”  This always struck me as hopeful but not uncomplicated phrasing.  For we have constructed a world where the threat and use of force is, for many, the wallpaper that covers their world, an expectation that literally envelops their reality with its overly-muscular and militarized imagery, its inflexible bureaucracies, its self-refereential supervision, its stubborn power imbalances. It is hard for many now, as perhaps it has always been, to imagine a world suggested by the manger – vulnerable beginnings which transition into lives which are threatening only to those whose influence in the world is a byproduct of what we at the UN refer to often as “coercive measures rather than of commitments to compassion, forgiveness, dignity and equity.

And the “loving” option is certainly no simple matter either.  Indeed, it is a matter much more easily professed than discharged, a claim too often drowning in intangible sentiment that sounds perpetually better in theory than in practice.  Love is, for most of us, an easy choice, but as we soon find out is one fraught with missed connections and self-deceptions.  We tend to forget (or ignore) how much of our being is earmarked for competition, possession and, yes, force, and this is increasingly true in some measure across lines of gender, culture and ethnicity.  We are generally not as loving as we profess to be, surely not towards ourselves, certainly not towards others.

But having made the choice to eschew a life defined by “shoving” is an important transitional step, a step in keeping with a humble manger and the divine spark which emanated from it. While loving may ultimately offer “no place of safety,” as the late Gloria Jean Watkins (bell hooks) reminded us, it does offer us a path to follow, one suggested by humble origins and a subsequent life of divine purpose, a path which can take us to places where muscular force and the pain it inflicts has a measurably declining impact on how and why we live, what we can reasonably and hopefully aspire to for ourselves, our communities and our progeny.

The manger signifies more than merely tickling our sentiment.  It suggests a fresh way forward, a path towards higher levels of dignity and service; a path towards reversing the self-inflicted decay which now envelops too much of our planet, a path wherein we are moved to both protect what is most vulnerable and invest in what is most precious such that others can also share in the remaining manifestations of abundance which we who are most privileged so often prefer to horde.

Let us be clear: the Jesus we revere especially on this Christmas Day did not advocate violence nor find it attractive; did not spend his precious time on earth working on his abs; was not to be found “packing heat” (or the biblical equivalent) on the donkey that carried him ultimately into Jerusalem; did not conveniently turn away from acts of compassion and healing, even unto death.  And while he apparently turned over a table or two in the temple and had more than a few harsh words for those who represented or enabled a coercive empire, his cheeks always seemed to be turned.

Despite the contentions of some muscle-bound, force-challenged Christians, the Jesus who emerged from the Christmas manger is not “masked death” but unmasked life, offering guidance towards a world where the pain from coercion is no longer coin of the realm, and where what is most precious is duly acknowledged, protected and shared.  This is why the wonders and aspirations of Christmas still matter to me.  Perhaps to you as well.  

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Heavenly Rest:  The UN Pays a Holiday Health Visit, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Dec

Doctors_and_Nurses_at_War

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.  Kurt Vonnegut

Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.  Herbert M. Shelton

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.  Naomi Klein

A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ. John Steinbeck

If you would live long, open your heart.  Bulgarian saying

On the Sunday before Christmas I am staring at my worn and trusted crèche scene, a holy family “guarded” in this instance by replicas of cats and hippos and camels as well as by the more traditional barn animals.  For me, this scene represents a brief respite in a season that seems to have followed our cultures off a cliff of sorts – trading in the expectation of “heavenly rest” for the expectation that what “really matters” will magically appear at our front door or under a decorated tree.

Except that magic is at a premium.  I walked for over a mile yesterday down Broadway between rendezvous with good friends, past the high-end stores north of Canal Street before turning east towards the vegetable markets that line several of the streets of Chinatown.  The streets were packed.  The winds were howling. The car horns were blaring.  Children were in the midst of emotional meltdowns. The looks on the faces of most of the people I passed stretched beyond the usual wary impatience that characterizes so many in this city so much of the time.  This was stress of a different order, or so it seemed, the stress that accompanies the determination to make Christmas “matter” for someone at least, to make one last push through the crowded streets, through the racks of clothes and toy bins, through the long check-out lines, to satisfy an opaque longing that has everything to do with advertisers and virtually nothing to do with the message in the manger.

People in this city really do seem unhappy much of the time –and I would often add myself to their numbers– but especially so in this “joyous holiday season.”  It is though we have lifted a bandage covering the wounds of the year only to discover that the infection is worse than we imagined, that we are less healthy in mind, body and spirit than we ourselves, and our bartenders, therapists, pharmacists and yoga teachers, have allowed us to believe.

One verse of a well-known Christmas Carol ends with “sleep in heavenly peace.”  For too many of us, sleep in any form has become a virtual luxury, a deficit that directly and at times severely impacts the quality of our lives including the depth of our compassionate and active engagement with the world.  Our stressful societies have created for us a kind of double-whammy – distractions by day and restlessness by night.  We have become addicted to bombardment from outside ourselves and increasingly oblivious to the toll this is taking on our inner resources.

Regardless of our political affiliations or religious dispositions, we know that things are not right.  Too many of us work too hard to sustain lives that yield too few joys.  Too many of us cover our sorrows and anxieties with substances and diversions that are about as effective as painting a bathtub with watercolor. We fret about the “state of the world,” even lament the blood that occasionally appears on our collective hands, but soldier on as though the contents of the next smiley Amazon Box will heal what ails us, will restore our serially damaged relationship between longing and gratitude.

Institutions such as the United Nations have actually begun to take health issues a bit more seriously.   Here in New York, the UN has done important policy work on preparing for pandemic outbreaks as well as identifying remedial options for addressing the “non-communicable diseases” and even road hazards that continue to ravage communities and shorten life-spans.   Even the Security Council has gotten in on this act.   Just this past Friday, as one of its final contributions as an elected Council member, Sweden convened an excellent Arria Formula discussion focused on the most immediate implications of health for peace and security – issues of access to medical care in conflict zones as well as the growing danger to medical practitioners operating in such zones, persons and facilities increasingly targeted by state forces and non-state armed groups in fundamental violation of international law.

These are matters crucial to any and all efforts to preserve and promote the peace.  It’s bad enough that we aren’t more successful in preventing conflicts, in part through a clearer examination of the “interests they serve,” but to actively prevent persons already-devastated by armed violence from receiving the modicum of care available to them in conflict zones is beyond reprehensible.  Wars have rules, we are told, most of which are related to the treatment of non-combatants, but these rules are constantly in various states of violation.  As Swedish Ambassador Skoog put it, the gaps between “what is said and what is done” on health care access and the safety of health care workers continue to be large.  In this instance as in others, our “humane ideas” must come attached to more humane practices and, as France noted during the session, greater accountability for perpetrators of abuses.

Fulfilling this “sacred responsibility” to conflict-related casualties requires, as Peru’s Ambassador noted, a “homogenous approach to protection” with uniform standards that are both upheld and guaranteed by the Security Council and other UN member states.   Such guarantees are frustratingly hard to come by in this current phase of human existence.  As we were reminded by a panelist from South Sudan, the degree of difficult in field surgery is sent through the roof once the bombs resume falling.  Surgeons, it appears, “can cut out everything except the cause.”

We must, as many speakers noted, be more attentive to the needs and resources of those who make such sacrifices to bind together those who have been maimed by violence in its many facets.  But genuine healing is even more comprehensive than the bombs we prevent, the destruction averted, the injuries avoided, even by eliminating the trauma that impacts confidence in life, including the confidence to seek out treatment.  It is also a function of getting our institutions right, of making certain that we are doing what we can to optimize our performance in the world, in part by insisting on more healthfully engaged colleagues. The UN itself still has things to learn in this regard.

We must take our collective health more seriously, in all its dimensions.  Our “sad souls” and the things we do to cover that sadness are collectively doing us in, making us more “cranky” than we need to be, isolating us socially and spiritually, but also shutting down our practical empathy for others – the needy in our immediate midst, the migrants at our borders, the victims of our thoughtless policy choices, those whose bodies have been mangled and psyches traumatized courtesy of our overly politicized and militarized international engagements.  We don’t need to be this way; we don’t need to bury our own wounds while simultaneously inflicting wounds on others.  Whatever you understand “human nature” to be, this isn’t an example.  This isn’t inevitable.

The call to the deeper health advocated here is not satisfied by going to the gym or swallowing our meds.  And it is not satisfied through pious calls to “take care of ourselves,” as though most of us actually know what that means. The health we would do well to seek instead, that indeed this season calls for, is a collective and comprehensive endeavor – a commitment to maintain and share in what Wendell Berry once called “the feast of creation,” a feast fully open for a time only to the few while impeded for the many by the artifacts of our often thoughtless predation.

Whether particularly religious or not, I wish each of you a portion of “heavenly rest” this season, a time of uninterrupted sleep, inspirational dreams, successful self-reflection and ultimately a renewed commitment to the health and well-being of others.  Rest assured that we will all sleep more soundly in a world of greater hospitality for refugees, an end to threats against health and humanitarian workers, the cessation of bombing raids and all indiscriminate killing –especially in the places where children live and learn –and far fewer, less intrusive, external distractions of all kinds.

May this soon come to pass

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Away in a Manger:  The UN Sends a Christmas Message to the Displaced, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Dec

It’s Christmas Eve morning and on a table near my computer is a dusty wooden crèche, a replicated space apparently large enough to hold a holy family, a couple of onlookers, a barn animal or two and some early-arriving dignitaries.  The crèche is guarded by a host of other creatures courtesy of my many trips abroad – a camel, a hippo and a variety of cats – lots of cats.  Atop the crèche is a cross tied together with palms from the previous Lenten Season – a reminder of where this particular birth, indeed all of our births are ultimately headed.

In part because we are so desperate for vindication of our optimisms, we have somehow managed to sentimentalize the manger event.  Oh sure it must have been cold.   And it really isn’t anyone’s fault that there was no room at the Inn.  And the travel to Bethlehem couldn’t have been THAT treacherous.  And the manger doesn’t appear to be THAT uncomfortable.

On an on it goes, trivializing the scene, apply the “Hollywood gloss” to the lives of persons who were in essence displaced.   Persons with few tangible assets.   Riding a donkey across treacherous pathways while coping with the uncertainties of an immanent birth event.   Fleeing violence and rumors of violence for a mostly uncertain future. Showing up at an Inn with a keeper who might well have had every reason to believe that a cleaner, higher class of folks would soon arrive to purchase what were probable (still) empty beds, folks ready to eat and drink without bringing with them the drama and danger that so often accompanied birth in those times.

The manger is not a film set, nor should it constitute an occasion to celebrate the holy baby while ignoring the unholy circumstances.  This was hard, harder than most everyone who will bother to read this missive will have ever experienced in their lives.

There are millions of people this very day who also find themselves on the treacherous move – fleeing conflict they had no role in starting, walking many miles without being able to quench their thirst or reassure their children, bearing the load of the most essential provisions while, in some instances, carrying within them the multiple “weights” of a new life.

For some, the actual manger from this Christmas season would be a relief:  a donkey to ride when feet are weary, some hay to provide minimal comfort while waiting along hostile borders, the hope that the same Innkeeper who provided the manger space might also show some mercy and provide nourishment for the new mother.

For many of the millions of displaced who are today on the move, such mercy is hard to come by.  Despite the misery of their often torturous journeys, they encounter closed and closely guarded borders, hostile governments and their electorates, and sometimes very cold hearts.

Too many of us nowadays wouldn’t let the displaced get close enough to knock on our doors let alone to direct them to a relatively comfortable and safe landing.

For all its warts, the UN is taking the needs of the displaced seriously.   The UN has not always done enough to stop the bombing or alleviate the poverty and drought that drive so much global displacement, but neither has it minimized the immense physical suffering and psychological trauma that displacement occasions.  In resolution after resolution, the UN has urgently highlighted the multiple burdens of displacement – from physical deprivation and hostile countries of destination to increased vulnerabilities to criminal elements, including and especially from traffickers.

One example of this concern was this week in a (much too small) UN conference room within which the UN Office for Drugs and Crimes’ 2016 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons was launched.  The event was sponsored by France and included UNODC’s director Yuri Fedotov and the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad.  It also included many states affirming commitments made in aforementioned resolutions and through the New York Declaration, a seminal document that outlines challenges and obligations towards the displaced by both states and diverse, additional stakeholders.

There were many insights from this event, one of which is that states are being more thoughtful about the particular vulnerabilities of displaced persons, especially to traffickers — those soliciting victims for forced prostitution, for child labor, even for child soldiers.  It was Mexico that most clearly acknowledged the preponderance of “push and pull” factors that promote displacement noting that, for all the attention that the displaced now rightly receive, both raw numbers and vulnerabilities continue to rise.  Such discouraging data, as noted by UNODC director Fedotov, must inspire us to more thoughtful, comprehensive commitments to the victims of displacement, including as noted by Iraq, commitments to help those seeking to return to their homes to do so.

One of the longer-term lessons of Christmas for me has been that in settings such as the manger-turned–delivery-room — settings of uncertainty and discomfort, settings of weariness and fear — a child can be born bearing the capacity to literally change the world.

On this Christmas, along many militarized borders, in many makeshift refugee camps, on many cramped crafts that are anything but sea-worthy, there are children about to leave the womb, children who also bear the capacity to make change and bring hope in our world.  Given the violent, melting state of our planet and the unbridled confusion and anger of so many of its current inhabitants, we would be foolish and grossly negligent to do anything other than welcome and nurture their promise.

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