our common journey: all are refugees

Epiphany, when we remember the wise men who knelt before the Son of God to pay Him homage, will always be a personal favorite.

On January 5, Epiphany’s eve -- exactly 59 years ago, my parents, my brother and I left our home town of Pinar del Río for the capital city of Habana. There, our family of four boarded a plane toward an unknown, mysterious and invisible future, becoming refugees in a new land. 

On that day, like the wise men who followed only the star, my parents chose to do the inconceivable, to leave the only place we had ever known, with nothing but our faith and hope in God's promises. I was 17 months old, the youngest of María de Jesús and Ignacio's children.

My official passport photo for leaving Cuba

When I look at my granddaughter now, roughly the same age I was when I walked out on that tarmac, I am blown away by the truth that certain life-altering experiences - like becoming a refugee - are etched deeply in our souls, shaping who we are. These moments may not live in my conscious memories, but they changed me forever. Emotions transcend memory.

My parent's anxiety, fear, determination as they walked us from airport official to official, clinging to each other and to each of us. The cruelty of the officer at the airport who ripped a doll from my arms. The passengers’ tension after hours of waiting on the runway, fearful that someone else would be taken off the plane. And the peace that surpasses understanding, as my father, who was aptly named after the brave Ignatius of Loyola, quietly began to recite, 

"El Señor es mi pastor, nada me falta... the Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want."

The events that led to my parent's decision to risk everything and leave family and home evolved quickly. Fidel Castro had closed the churches and the Catholic schools where both my parents worked. And he had collected religious men, women, priests, brothers, sisters, whom my parents considered friends, family and mentors, and literally shipped them off the island on a boat, destination unknown.

My own dad had been picked up on his way home one day and taken to the local jail for interrogation, accused of speaking out in the local Catholic newspaper, condemning how the Church and its people were being treated. Providentially, in the chaos of an evolving, disorganized revolution, my father was miraculously let go in the middle of the night and sent home.

 

Not long after the wise men venerated baby Jesus, Scripture tells us that an angel came to Joseph and told him to leave everything behind and take Mary and the baby to a foreign land—refugees, like me.

My parents' courage and faith is genuinely a parable, much like the parables Jesus used to proclaim Truth to His disciples, and now to us.

 

Surely with much fear and trepidation, they chose to believe in the promise we pray every morning in the Canticle of Zechariah:

This was the oath he swore to our father [Ignacio]:
to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
free to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight
all the days of our life.

Although there are many in the world who will, most of us will not be faced by such stark choices this coming year. But a pandemic has made us experience profound emotions: fear and anxiety; exiled from our normal, refugees separated from family, work, and everything familiar. We are still struggling with abandonment, isolation, distress, letting go of the known for something new and incomprehensible.

 

There really is only one choice before us, choose Life. Follow the star. Believe in the promise, the oath, God made with each of us.

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[NOTE: I am excited to begin a new journey this month as columnist for Liguorian Magazine's regular column, "Just live it"!  Clickhere for the printed, edited version of this column, y ¡feliz día de los tres Santos Reyes! ✨