• Merry Christmas 2015!

    Reflections for the Holiday Season

    Today many Syrian refugees are celebrating Christmas in Canada and perhaps their first safe and peaceful Christmas in many years but without all their loved ones. I can only imagine their joy mingled with loss and sadness.

    Sixty seven years ago in 1948, my mother-in-law’s family celebrated its first Christmas in Canada in a wooden shed warmed by fire from a stove on a farm in Langley, BC. They were a displaced family without her father who had been taken away by the Soviet communists. They were among the lucky German Mennonite refugees from Ukraine sponsored to Canada by the Mennonite Central Committee with the help of a distant relative. My mother-in-law has a vivid memory of that first Christmas. She says, “There were a few feet of snow outside. The ship lap boards on the exterior walls of the shed had gaps in them. It was cold but we felt warm and grateful. For the first time in my life we were free and safe to sing songs of joy and peace. We were sad to not have my father with us. Many other Mennonite families also had lost loved ones including children and their fathers, uncles and grandfathers. We were excited to open our presents which we had ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue. Canada has been wonderful to us.”

    As a young married couple with their newly born first child, my father and mother lived through pain, suffering and death of millions in Punjab during the 1947 division of Pakistan and India. It was the largest forced migration in history with horrific violence and destruction with some great feats of kindness and sacrifice. My father risked his life protecting Punjabi Muslims fleeing to Pakistan while helping to settle displaced Punjabi Sikhs in the Indian side of Punjab.

    Jesus with his parents, Joseph and Mary, were displaced persons as well. According to the Gospel of Matthew, God appeared to Joseph in a dream, “Get up, take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” Afraid of the ancient Jewish prophecies about a saviour being born in Bethlehem, King Herod, the proxy ruler for the occupying Romans in Judea, sent his troops to kill all the boys two years of age and under born in and around the vicinity of Bethlehem. Jesus and his family returned to their homeland after Herod had died.

    Jesus lived a simple life of compassion towards others. He crossed boundaries and challenged prevailing social norms. He healed the sick, mended broken hearts, and, proclaimed justice and peace. He forgave those who nailed him to the cross. This Christmas let us celebrate our common humanity and seek to renew existing relationships and build new ones across boundaries upon compassion and not on commerce and power.

    Merry Christmas!