From the Dean’s Desk

 

Dear Friends,

The Rev. Cameron Trimble wrote this fabulous meditation, which I’m delighted to share. As we journey together into Advent, please read, reflect and respond…

 

“Advent is the season of holy darkness, the time when truth hides in shadow and asks if we’re willing to look. Each year it returns, not to redeem the world but to remind us that light is always being born through us, again and again.

Sarah Stillman’s reporting in The New Yorker exposes one of those shadows: immigrants vanished by our own government—people taken from their homes, shackled, flown in the night to foreign prisons or dangerous borderlands in countries they have never known. They are not abstractions. They are mothers, students, grandfathers, musicians, seekers of safety. They have names: Jim, Miriam, Orville.

At the heart of these deportations is a moral collapse: the decision to make certain people unseeable. They are disappeared not just from geography but from moral imagination. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once said, “The face of the other is the beginning of all ethics.” When we erase those faces—behind deportation orders, military flights, and shadow dockets—we erase the possibility of goodness itself.

When George Washington toasted, “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong,” ships were already docking in Charleston, heavy with enslaved Africans whose names were stripped away. America was conceived as sanctuary and as prison simultaneously, a contradiction that still shapes our collective soul.

Advent does not let us look away. It insists that we sit with the world as it is—messy, interdependent, aching for justice. The story of the Christ child begins with a refugee family fleeing state violence, carrying divine hope across a border at night. To practice Advent is to stand with every mother and father who still does the same.

There is a darkness God inhabits—not the darkness of cruelty, but the womb-like darkness of becoming, where truth begins to stir. We must enter

that darkness now. Theologian Dorothee Sölle once wrote that “God has no other hands than ours.” If that’s true, then the work of Advent is not only to wait for light but to become it, to bear witness, to intervene, to name what empire disappears.

Still, I struggle to know how to act in the face of this atrocity. I want to stop these deportations, as I know you do too. There is no “solution” that fits neatly within the current political schema. But there are invitations, acts that stretch toward the world that could yet be born:

• Witnessing: not just in empathy but in embodied memory—refusing erasure. Remembering these people as people and telling their stories again and again.
• Reframing belonging: advocating for ways of belonging that do not depend on documentation, borders, or detachment from relational context.
• Denouncing extraction: calling out the logic that treats human beings as movable objects, as commodities.
• Centering relational safety: insisting that care is infrastructural, that protection, sanctuary, and access to justice belong to the commons, not to privilege.
• Weaving solidarity: building alliances between immigrants and communities that uphold the value of relational life over bureaucratic abstraction.

Howard Thurman said, “There must be always remaining in every man’s life some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathless and beautiful.” The singing of angels this Advent will not drown out the cries from Bundase Camp or the forests of Togo. But it can accompany them, reminding us that beauty and justice are not opposites. They are the same song, sung from opposite sides of the veil.

This Advent, may we refuse indifference. May we see the disappeared not as strangers but as Christ among us—exiled, handcuffed, and still carrying light.”

 

Faithfully in Christ,

The Very Reverend René R. John+
Dean