Who will teach us?

One of the pushchair wheels is about to fall off. Then she will have to carry him, along with

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the plastic bag with their remaining bits of food, a couple of clean nappies, a precious toy belonging to her eldest child and what little money she has left. The bag feels as if it might split at any moment. Then she will not have a spare hand for the smallest of her other two children who are already tired. They only got off the train at the Macedonian border half an hour ago. They slept on the train, thank goodness, and so did she – a bit. But they still have a mile to walk and it is blisteringly hot. Some say the guards at the next border will be helpful, but there are widely differing reports about this. They press on.

None of this is imagined. It is simply a logically predictable expansion of about 30 seconds worth of news footage glimpsed last night in the background while the commentary was going on. It represents what is now being called the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war. One woman in a million with a name and a story.

How do our names and our current stories relate to hers? Perhaps our particular circumstances, though different, are in their own way as extreme. So we don’t have much emotional energy left for this woman and for the millions like her. Suffering is just suffering, after all. But if you were walking alongside her on the way to the next European border she would listen to your story, and her suffering, with all which that entails, would meet you in yours. That is perhaps why we need her in our country. Incidentally, she is highly qualified. She is the head teacher of a key school in a Syrian border town.

She also brings a different wisdom, one to which we have grown less accustomed, but which makes us fully human. It is a wisdom which is only acquired through sacrificial love, the love which will leave this woman having to carry a heavy toddler once the pushchair breaks down.

The refugee crisis indicates the extent to which we get our priorities wrong when it comes to the real value of other human beings. We do not understand what makes for the well being of our own communities, still less of our nation which is, after all, made up of human beings all of whom have, in some measure at least, experienced suffering and loss in their lives. On the whole, we seem to be content to be less than human, pressing on, but often in the wrong direction and for the wrong reasons.

Few of us have been refugees or known real persecution. Much of what most of us suffer are things we dare not face about ourselves, including our complicity with the causes of other people’s suffering. These feelings are buried alive somewhere in our deepest collective psyche, waiting for the moment when we learn, or fail to learn, acceptance and forgiveness as individuals and as nations. Who will teach us such a precious lesson if it is not those who have suffered and endured what the woman who is walking from the train to the next border is currently enduring? More specifically, in the case of the UK, who will teach us such things if it is not those whose suffering we are partly responsible for, but who believe enough in our goodness as a nation to want to make a new life here?