By the Light of that Star

Another Christmas Story

“By a high star our course is set.” — Louis MacNeice

“In the bleak midwinter frosty wind made moan." — from A Christmas Carol, by Christina Rossetti

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On Christmas morning 1939, a minister serving a church a few miles west of Boston, Massachusetts, stepped into the pulpit and made a special request: Just this morning, I received word that a ship carrying refugees will be docking in Boston within the next few days, he told the parishioners. The refugees will need temporary homes. Would you take them in?¹

That minister – the Reverend Waitstill Sharp – and his wife, Martha, received a lot of press a couple of decades ago when the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem honored them posthumously, designating them “righteous among nations” because of their rescue work during the Holocaust. In the wake of that honor, PBS aired a Ken Burns documentary about them and their work (About the Film | Defying the Nazis: The Sharps' War | Ken Burns | PBS). But the story of their parish, the Unitarian Universalist Society of Wellesley Hills, on Christmas morning 1939 lies buried in a dusty volume of the Christian Register shelved at the Harvard Divinity School library. Only some sketchy details survive:

The ship churning toward Boston carried 87 refugees, all but one or two of them Jewish. “Almost all the men [aboard] had spent some time in concentration camps.”

The ship navigated dangerous waters. At night, they sailed without lights, relying on the safety of black skies to protect them from detection. Off the coast of Nova Scotia, the ship nearly collided with another unlighted ship, sailing ghost-like through the dark.

In the bleak midwinter, indeed.

We might imagine some details: cold waves rocking the ship, the deep darkness with only moon and stars to guide them. We might wonder about the people aboard . . . who they were, what they lived through and left behind, what emotions rocked their hearts as they journeyed, not knowing the reception awaiting them. Would they be welcomed? Or turned away?

As it turned out, several Boston-area organizations provided asylum for all of the refugees. Wellesley Unitarians sheltered thirty-four of them.

Thirty-four — or even eighty-seven — seems a miniscule number of rescued refugees in the face of millions who perished during the Holocaust, including many turned away from America’s shores. (Let us not forget, for example, another ship, the St. Louis, which, only months earlier in 1939, carried nearly 1000 Jewish refugees from Europe. After the St. Louis was infamously and shamefully turned away first from Cuba and then from the U. S., she ultimately sailed back to Europe, where many of her passengers were captured and died in the Holocaust.) But the refugees Waitstill Sharp sought to help at Christmas 1939 received a life-affirming and hope-affirming welcome in a world grown dangerous and dim. And for the Wellesley parishioners, the docking ship presented a gift, too — the opportunity to open their hearts.

Often hope arrives in pinpricks as seemingly tiny as the stars in the night sky appear to us. The smallest gestures contain the seeds of change. An offered shelter, a bed, food on the table, the willingness to set aside one’s own busy-ness to attend to another’s needs, the chance to serve.

Nestled against Wellesley’s Christmas story is another: one of weary travelers — Joseph and Mary, his laboring wife. In the face of tyranny, their baby is born. According to the story that has been passed down to us, the parents are so poor they are not even allowed a shelter suitable for birthing their baby. In the Bible stories, angels sing, shepherds quake, wise men journey from afar, bearing gifts for the child. And above Bethlehem, a new star shimmers in the night sky.

The real event — however, whenever, and wherever it exactly happened — was surely infinitely less grand. Just one more mother crying out her birthing pains. One more father struggling against all odds to shelter his family. One more baby born into poverty in uncertain and troubled times. Only later — after that unlikely prophet had lived his meteoric life — did it seem some celestial event must have presaged his birth.

For me, the Christmas story derives its beauty by making hope accessible and present, rather than exotic and far from my grasp. The fabled star that shimmers yet across the centuries reminds me the face of hope appears in the humblest of places — a manger, for instance, or a ship — and in the unlikeliest of creatures — a human being, for instance. Like you or me.

May we seek those commonplace instances of hope and bring them to birth over and over again. May we fling our stories of hope heavenwards, so that together they may twinkle and tremble, as stars in the night sky.

I love the night sky at its deepest, blackest pitch, when the moon is new and ambient light darkened. Then those tiny star lights crowd together — almost alive with a dancing brightness. On nights like that, I am reminded of the words of Hungarian-born poet Hannah Senesh — herself a casualty of the Holocaust:

“There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for [Humankind].²”

By the light of those stars, may we sail forward in our uncertain times. By the light of those stars, may we discover the beacon that will help us to usher in a world of peace.

By the light of those stars.

Love,

Sylvia

1 All of the information about the Wellesley Hills Unitarian church was taken from: Robert C. Dexter, "What One Parish Did for German and Czech Refugees," The Christian Register, January 24, 1940. All quotes are from that article as well.

2 Eva Fogelman, 1994 Conscience and Courage, (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday.) 312.