Abstract
As I sit to write this, it is Refugee week, the 25th year of marking the importance and highlighting the plight and injustices of thousands of exiles and asylum seekers. So many people confess that they feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the current situation. The UK media regularly update us on how many hundreds of people cross the channel in small boats daily. So, what to say to all those who feel helpless and struggle with an unjust situation?
Surprisingly it’s the prophet Jeremiah who helped to galvanise my thoughts. Challenging and reminding me of an important aspect of our faith—where we have come from.
Our faith and history as followers of Jesus Christ goes back to a people in exile, a people who found their identity wandering in a desert. In chapter 20, Jeremiah laments and addresses God in his despair, expressing his pain, lamenting his situation and crying for help. What is startling is this lament ends with a song of praise:
Sing to the Lord;
Praise the Lord!
For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.
My understanding of what it is to be exiled has deepened and been challenged over the past 7 years. Alongside my priestly vocation, I have been immersed in refugee work. I have worked in Greece, in the notorious Moria Refugee Camp, and in Calais as Refugee Project Officer. At the moment, my husband and I are hosting unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, in our home—providing short-term crisis support. They stay with us on a short-term basis until permanent accommodation can be found.
I could easily focus solely on stories of lament—the painful stories of refugees seeking safety and sanctuary—stories of violence, of young children watching family members killed in front of them, hiding in homes because of religious persecution, of escaping illegal armies, of torture in Libya, of human trafficking or stories of boys living with us, exhibiting signs of trauma—nightmares, flashbacks, and disrupted eating patterns. Let me tell you, there is much to lament, much to weep for. But instead, I am challenged to ‘Sing to the Lord! Praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy’.
How then can we live as Jeremiah did, as if the lives of the needy have been delivered? Opening ourselves to the pain of so many can often feel unbearable, but as the Franciscan Richard Rohr says, “We must not separate ourselves from the suffering of the world. When we’re close to those in pain, their need evokes love in us.”
The confronting of pain, racism, injustice, disaster—indeed the plight of the refugee, it is hugely challenging. But I truly believe, we need the refugee for us to learn what it means to give openly and generously, remembering that much of our faith tradition has been influenced by a people formed in exile.
There is a danger that we can get so caught up in the rights and wrongs of the ‘migrant crisis’ or other injustices, that we lose sight of ‘the one’ that we can act for, the one who can be fed and given a home. The one who has a name and a story. A call to love.
Jeremiah challenges and teaches us to start with lament—start with the pain and shift our focus from despair to praise. Singing as a protest. Singing as hope. Singing new life into reality.