Rachel Allred

A Symbol of Hope

As the last glimpse of dusk’s dimming light disappears beyond the horizon, a light emerges from inside a canvas tent. A flap of it’s fabric folded upwards to make a doorway revealing a Syrian refugee, a woman, inside holding and comforting her baby as she sits on the dirt floor. The tent itself is nearly empty. Besides the woman and her child, there is only a pot cooking on a portable burner and a pair of sandals. The light from inside illuminates on the fabric-made wall the name of the organization which provided the tent.

In 2011, the Syrian people protested against the government with hopes to progress long promised but not yet realized political and social reforms. In response to these protest Bashar Al-Assad, their current president, promised to make changes. However not long after this statement the government sent in troops to crack down on the protestors. Four and a half years later the struggle of civil war between the people of Syria and the Al-Assad regime has only digressed becoming more violent and complex.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the midst of this conflict, and millions have fled and are still attempting to flee the country. Traveling only with what they can carry they attempt to get through the border. Those who make it cram onto boats, hundreds of people elbow to elbow on a craft meant for lighter capacities. They embark onto perilous waters many of the boats do not make it. The unidentified bodies from capsized ships wash in with the tide; their swollen frames, shells of flesh, are the only remnants of once existing lives full of hopes and aspirations. Many of the refugees, who do make it across the mediterranean sea, find that there is nowhere for them to go. Many of the countries, unable to support the large Immigration of people, have closed their borders to the Syrian refugees.

In Germany during world war two, Jews were persecuted because of their beliefs. Some of the Jews were able to flee from the Nazi occupied countries, though many were not so lucky. Some went into hiding, but many were arrested by officers and taken to prison camps--camps that were cruel and later revealed to be camps of horror and torture.

In the year 1776 a group of men gathered to risk their lives as they signed their names to a document that, if their cause should fail, would condemn them to death for treason against the King. It marked the beginning of a revolutionary country that was destined to fail, and to fail again until it finally succeeded while hanging on the mere fibers of faith and divine providence.

In 1620, two centuries after Columbus landed in the Americas, the pilgrim separatists left England on the Mayflower in order to practice their beliefs freely. They struggled in the new land, and many of them died within the first winter. They were able to progress only after they befriended a tribe of natives who taught them how to grow food.

And in that tent somewhere along the border of syria where that woman comforts her child as the evening light drains into darkness, does she know she is not alone? That she is one of hundreds of thousands, millions, that have gone before her? Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, grandparents, families, babies, all part of the same movement. A movement that is no respecter of persons, or religion, whether Christian, Jew, or Muslim, alike, if any religion at all. All of them searching for a place to practice their beliefs, a place where they can have freedom to choose, and to act, where they are represented fairly. They search for hope, that tomorrow will be brighter and better than today.

The image of the mother in the tent in syria, is stuck in my mind. The light flooding into the darkness from inside the tent, where she is sitting with her child, reminds me of another mother in the midst of Roman occupied Israel. That mother sat in a lowly stable holding her newborn child. His birth, though it would’ve been appropriate, was not in a palace but in a mere stable, witnessed only by the animals kept there. Dark evening surrounded them. The stars in the heavens accompanying the dim light of their lantern. However the light illuminating that dark night didn’t originate from stars or lanterns but from the baby. The baby laid in a manger because he was the ultimate advocate for free agency. His name, a name that would be marked through time, is a symbol of hope.