‘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 grandchildren 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?” asked Dr. Peter Andrews of University of Cambridge and Robert Massey of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. A “stationary point of Jupiter,” perhaps?

In 5 B.C., the year 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,” Andrews 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.

The poverty that hobbles adults is vastly different from the indigence that chokes off the sparkle in children, says United Nations Children’s 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 through the plight of 93 million children 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 children agonize from at least one form of severe deprivation—meaning, lack of, say, basic health care, 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 percent higher in rural Philippines than in urban areas—a feature shared by Thailand and Cambodia. The number of impoverished children among minority ethnic Filipino groups, like the lumad, was nine times higher than the number of impoverished children among 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 lumad reject the idea of a Bangsamoro homeland, with expanded territory and powers, as demanded by the MILF,” says Bryony Lau, International Crisis Group’s South East Asia analyst. Government and MILF were prodded “to 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 Vietnam, the 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  his/her early years. Davao death squads copycat Brazil’s vigilante slaying of street children in the 1990s. They have targeted 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 Independent. Under daughter Mayor Sara Duterte, those who object get the “dirty finger” drill.

Halina, Hesus (Come, Jesus) and save us from the terror and all the hells we create for our selves, we have begged Advent after Advent. Fr. Catalino Arevalo of the 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:  from brothers killing brothers in Basilan” (the Maguindanao slaughter, desaparecidos  Redemptorist Fr. 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, Father Arevalo added. “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 not 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 the 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.”

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