This picture hung in the bedroom that my sister and I shared when we were very small. When one of us couldn’t sleep my mother would pick us up and tell us the story of the flight into Egypt. She’d point to St Joseph finding dates for Mary and the baby Jesus, Mary having a rest, the baby Jesus waking up and playing with the grapes and the donkey having a drink and some grass to eat. The Holy Family had reached an oasis – a place of safety. At that point, my sister and I would begin to feel safe too and we’d trot back to our beds and fall asleep again.
In truth, such journeys, flights from a home which has become a dangerous and precarious place, are not the calm and soothing escape to safety that my mother evoked for her children.
“If only they realised that I had no choice …” is what someone at the Refugee Support Centre Drop-In told me in despair last week. She was talking about the various British officials to whom she has had to explain her situation since arriving in the UK. When she and her two daughters left South America, they were in very great danger. They had to leave so as not to be murdered. Just like the Holy Family fleeing Herod’s wrath, and like many other migrants hurriedly packing belongings and leaving homes silently, under cover of dark.
Across the world as resources and land grow scarce, and as climate change, gang violence and war make living conditions extremely dangerous, people feel they have no choice if they want to survive and to protect their children.
But finding safety is difficult. We richer, stabler nations are not always happy to share our comforts and security. As our own lives feel the pinch of wars and shortages, we feel we have more to lose and less to give away.
We wring our hands and bemoan the people smugglers who bring vulnerable families (and many unaccompanied teenagers) to our shores and make a lot of money for themselves by exploiting the migrants’ distress. One man’s loss is another man’s gain is a continual human paradigm: where there is need, someone will always try and make a quick (and often large) buck.
Of course, governments and international crime prevention bodies have a duty to protect migrants and bring the people smugglers to justice but I worry that our focus on the criminals (and our desire for justice) is an easier outlet than sharing our resources with strangers.
Why is sharing so hard? Time after time it’s the people with the least that give the warmest and most generous hospitality. It’s a poignant irony. Why are those with less able to give away more? I think it’s because, having less to distract them and surround them, they have a much clearer idea of what is of real value – and that is the connection between human beings, the meal shared, the laughter and love that joins us.
Pope Francis urges us to see that we are all migrants, one great group of travellers making our way towards the Kingdom of God. Not only that, he asks us to recognise God’s face in the multitude of strange faces all trying to navigate our hostile world: “See in the migrants of our time, as in those of every age, a living image of God’s people on their way to the eternal homeland”.
God, Pope Francis reminds us, “not only walks with His people, but also within them, (…) particularly with the least, the poor and the marginalized. In this, we see an extension of the mystery of the Incarnation.”
Though we live on earth,
our true citizenship is in heaven.
Do not let us become possessive
of the portion of the world
You have given us as a temporary home,
together with our migrant brothers and sisters,
toward the eternal dwelling you have prepared for us.
Open our eyes and our hearts
so that every encounter with those in need
becomes an encounter with Jesus, Your Son and our Lord.
Amen.
(2024 Message for the 110th World Day of Migrants and Refugees).
If we are all one, and all travelling together, then we can share gladly, knowing we will have precious treasure shared with us too. If we journey together, there is more chance that we will reach a place of safety, a place like the oasis in the picture that hung in my childhood bedroom.
I have to share another picture. A present day version of the David picture above. I love it and it’s a useful reminder of everything Pope Francis was trying to tell us last October.
Katie Livesey
2024
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