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?

Timewarp

While browsing for an image of refugees to use for this post, I have just stumbled on one of those American websites which thinks it has permission to say anything, as long as what it says justifies both its fear and its hatred of all who are perceived as alien, specifically

Muslims, and Muslim refugees in particular. In its paranoia, the site claims that Texas will soon have to submit to Sharia law, that term being understood in its most pejorative, narrow and repressive sense. It also states that refugees disembarking in Lampedusa complain that there are not enough ‘freebies’ and that they also complain of receiving no support from the Italian government – nor should they, the website says.  The rhetoric continues in a far more extreme and barely printable vein, so I hastily deleted the page from my browser history, a kneejerk reaction perhaps.

Fear, even the puerile fear of being thought to take an interest in dubious websites, is what prompts kneejerk reactions, including that of turning off, or turning on, that particular site, or a programme or news item which fascinates as much as it informs.

We are fascinated by other people’s pain, and we fear that fascination. What other possible explanation could there be for the commercial success of the thoroughly nasty in the world of media, books and entertainment – apart from the possibility of there being something thoroughly nasty inside all of us which we both fear and are compelled to revisit?

Some of us are quite addicted to the news. But being a bit of a news junkie is not just a slightly voyeuristic form of conscience appeasement, in other words, wanting to know what is happening to strangers in distant places and convincing ourselves that we care. It is also about trying to make sense of suffering and of understanding ourselves and our own suffering a little better.  

It seems that engaging with the pain of strangers, and of other nations, reveals two things about suffering in general. First, that every person’s suffering, and the suffering of every innocent creature, is connected to the suffering of those who have gone before and, second, that suffering, including the suffering of the earth and of animals, is never pointless, although it may seem so at the time. Engaging with the suffering of others, even in the briefest and most superficial way, reveals how all suffering is connected. But knowing this does not necessarily make us more caring or more generous, because despite the immediacy of the internet and the sense of intimacy which it brings to any violent or tragic situation, the suffering, as far as we are concerned, is still going on somewhere else. It is not happening to me or to anyone I know. It is also compressed into a very short time space, long enough for a brief interview and some film footage. The suffering of others is both immediate and far away, close up and beyond reach, real and unreal.

Paradoxically, this creates a kind of limbo in which we can more or less ‘deal’ with the chaos and breakdown of nations and communities and with the devastation of lives, lives such as those which wash up on the shores of Lampedusa.  But instantaneous information also disempowers. Before we have had a chance to think about the situation in any depth, the moment has passed and another news item is before us, usually wholly unrelated to what preceded it. This in turn contributes to a sense of not being able to hold things together, one which mirrors the fragmentation of the world in which, as the poet W.B. Yeats wrote, ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’.

One way to counter this sense of falling apart is to consciously ‘hold’ all that is going on around us, and the essence of any present moment – its ‘itness’,  within the embrace of God and to allow him to ‘grasp’ it. We hold by simply paying attention to the news, and to the moment being covered, in the presence of God, while at the same time letting go of it. Ultimately, it is the letting go which matters. Letting go is the allowing which comes with acceptance of the way things are and the acknowledgment that we have all played a part in making them so. Once the allowing has been done we can yield the world’s suffering, and our own, to the only one who can prevent an irrevocable falling apart of all things. We accept and then yield into the outstretched arms of the crucified God, who is the risen Christ who loves us and who is always inviting us to keep company with him. It is a way of life.