Blog

Life is full of surprises, large and small, good and bad, and I sometimes feel that the Good Lord sends some of them into our lives to move us forward out of our comfort zones or our complacency so that we can make progress on our faith journey.

 

I recently registered for a short online course called Migration Matters with an English university.  I thought it would be useful for my work with Scottish Faiths Action for Refugees (SFAR) and the Working Group of the European Conference of Justice & Peace Commissions on Forced Migration and Human Rights. My only concerns about taking the course were centred on finding the time to do the required reading and take part in the online discussions. 

 

I rather assumed that the other participants likely to be on the course would probably to be people like myself from faith communities with interests in migrant/refugee issues or UK students doing related courses of study.  The surprise came when I accessed the website section where we were encouraged to introduce ourselves to each other. 

 

Of the 27 participants, some were as expected: a woman priest from the Scottish Episcopal Church, a Scottish based NGO worker, a Methodist church worker.  However the real surprise for me was that the majority of participants were refugees themselves, many based in the huge Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi (which houses 57,000 refugees according to UNHCR figures from March 2017, and which has been in existence since 1994).

 

As Pope Francis said in his tweet of 15 April 2016: “Refugees are not numbers, they are people who have faces, names, stories, and need to be treated as such.”
Well, now I had the names of some of these refugees, some of their pictures and parts of their stories.  One has been in the Dzaleka camp since 2005, another since 2010.  

 

Suddenly the course took on a whole new aspect for me and presented me with potential challenges as well.  It would not be like any other course I had taken part in.  The discussions were unlikely to be the comfortable academic ones about the papers we would be reading and the theories we would learning about, that I had anticipated.  Many of our participants would be living daily the realities that we would be talking about.

 

Their brief introductions make it clear that, despite their refugee status and the uncertainties of their lives, they are taking every opportunity to get an education.  A number have obtained qualifications through the Jesuit-run programme Jesuit Worldwide Learning (formerly Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins) in which the Jesuit Regis University is involved.  Some also act as volunteers with UNHCR in the camp, seeking to help other refugees. 

 

So before the course even starts, I have learned much.  I was not aware of the Dzaleka camp and the fact that many refugees had been there for such a significant part, if not all, of their lives.  Nor had I known of the great practical work being done by the Jesuit Refugee Service to try to ensure that young refugees don’t become a lost generation in terms of tertiary education. 

 

So far, so good, but the challenge for me as we begin is: what do or can I bring to this course when I am so conscious that so many of the participants are dealing with the issues and facing the problems of being migrants and refugees as their reality.

Perhaps in a later blog, I can answer that question.

 

Migration Matters, is a short online course at Catherine of Siena College, University of Roehampton.

If you have cause to read the UK Government website ‘nidirect’, you find a very encouraging statement:

 

 ‘The benefits system provides practical help and financial support if you are unemployed and looking for work. It also provides you with additional income when your earnings are low, if you are bringing up children, are retired, care for someone, are ill or have a disability.’

 

If you have seen the film I, Daniel Blake, you may have come away with a slightly different viewpoint. It is the Cathy Come Home of the 21st century and I for one would hope that it has a similar effect in changing government policies and public attitudes.

 

In April, our Justice and Peace group at St Margaret’s, Lochgilphead, in Argyll, invited our MP, Brendan O’Hara, to discuss how the benefits system disadvantages people living in rural areas, exacerbating poverty. Our research confirmed that too many members of our community suffer increased levels of stress and anxiety in their efforts to meet the criteria demanded by the system. Failure to meet those criteria frequently leads to individuals and families without food and living with the threat of homelessness. They become rural Daniel Blakes.

 

We know that it is hard enough wherever you live to be unemployed or on a low wage, but it really does get worse when there isn’t a bus to get you to the appointment on which hangs you being awarded benefits or being sanctioned instead. For the uninitiated, being sanctioned means your benefits are stopped – possibly for three weeks, possibly for more than a year.

 

Let me give you an example. A disabled man living outside a Mid Argyll village, two miles from a bus stop, was sanctioned because he couldn’t get to the Job Centre. By the time he was contacted, he hadn’t eaten for three days. The quickest ‘official’ food parcel, funded by the local social work department, couldn’t be delivered to him for six days. The local MS centre delivered food to him, adding fresh food items to the parcel.

 

That isn’t why the MS Centre exists – it’s there to care for people with multiple sclerosis and other auto-immune conditions. But it is in the local caring ‘charity’ loop and so heard about the situation and acted. It can’t act every time there’s such a crisis.

 

The Trussell Trust provided 145,865 3-day emergency food supplies in Scotland in 2016-17. Our nearest food banks are in Oban (a 74-mile round trip) and Campbeltown (a 100-mile round trip). Public transport is thin on the ground and costs money. The food parcels don’t contain any fresh food and people can’t afford the electricity costs to cook, so pot noodles and tinned creamed rice become staples. The idea of making your own nourishing soup is nothing more than a modern fairy story.

 

A local charity, MO-MA (Moving On Mid Argyll), which provides basic household and personal essentials for individuals and families moving into a new home after a crisis, now finds that they have to add food parcels to the package.

People have to go through hoops to get their benefits. Employment Support Allowance interviews may take place in Oban but PIP interviews may be carried out in Glasgow – a 190 mile round journey on buses that don’t always fit with appointment times. People already stressed and anxious become suicidal faced with these obstacles.

 

Our faith seeks to promote integral human development. Pope Francis has initiated a new dicastery with responsibilities that include ‘…those in need, the sick, the excluded and marginalized, the imprisoned and the unemployed’. Our Justice and Peace group now hopes to work with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and even more closely with our friends at MO-MA. And we’re hoping to make our voices heard at Westminster, whatever the election result.

A recent report has shown that Church attendance has decreased and suggests this is a crisis for Christianity. Well it might be - but it might not be.  In the past there was a tendency to go to Church for cultural rather than religious reasons. It was the expected thing to do. What we used to refer to as Christendom is certainly breaking down in our secular, multi-faith age. This means that the people who do go to Church are likely to be committed Christians who want the support of a Christian community and find Church an authentic expression of their faith. This change of circumstance was foretold many years ago by a Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, who spoke of a diaspora Church, a small but faithful Church, one that would be alive in faith and service to the world. As happens with such reports people begin to look for reasons for the decline and one given was that the Church was not seen as relevant and did not speak the language of ordinary people.  I agree with this and think the Church has much to learn but my experience this Easter has been very different from the picture painted by the report.

 

In the Catholic Church the three days from Holy Thursday to the vigil of Easter on Saturday evening is called the Sacred Triduum – it’s a time for Catholics to remember and enter into the rich meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The liturgy is different from the usual Eucharistic celebrations and the symbolism gets to the heart of what Christianity is about.  The Church I attended was packed for all of these services, no decline here, and if people didn’t come early they didn’t get a seat and had to stand – as many did on Good Friday. It was heartening to join a steady stream of people making their way towards the Church. It was as though the whole area was making their way there. The congregation was made up of old, young, middle aged, men, women and children. We welcomed refugees from Syria, a couple from Uganda recently moved into the area, a newly married couple, a couple who had recently had their first baby, people grieving the recent death of loved ones – in fact we were a microcosm of the  whole of humanity with all its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears. We couldn’t be self-satisfied or feel isolated from the reality of our world which at the present time feels a very dangerous place. These liturgies were definitely communal celebrations in which the whole world was present in our hearts and prayers.

 

Part of the Holy Thursday liturgy is the retelling and acting out of the story of the Last Supper when the priest washes the feet of twelve members of the community. We’re used to seeing pictures of Pope Francis doing this, usually in a prison and this year at a high security prison for mafia informers but it happens in all Catholic Churches throughout the world.  It reflects what Beatrice Bruteau calls ‘The Holy Thursday Revolution’ when the dominating, hierarchical relationships of our society are turned on their head - when one who is the Lord turns servant, not simply to show humility but to show that those hierarchical relations don’t matter anymore. For Christians this action is seen within the context of John’s account of Jesus’ sermon before he faces his death, when he calls his disciples friends, acknowledging his intimate relationship with them. He speaks of mutual indwelling between friends as well as with the source of Life which he calls The Father – reminiscent for me of Thich  Nhat Hanh’s interbeing. We ‘interbe’ with one another, we indwell one another, we share the same life force, we love others as we love ourselves because others are ourselves. There is a mutuality and interconnectedness at the heart of life and Jesus came as one who did not just serve but also allowed himself to be served. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and an unnamed woman washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.  Perhaps this mutuality should be included in the liturgy for Holy Thursday.  

 

Good Friday brings us face to face with the horror and helplessness that comes with death. Christians follow someone who was executed as a criminal for challenging the institutions of religion and politics in that he lived out his belief in mutuality, in getting to the heart of what religion is all about, in putting people before institutions.  He’s not the first or last to suffer such a fate. It’s as though society cannot cope with truth, with justice, with compassion, with selfless service, with forgiveness.  We all know the agony of bereavement, of loss so it’s easy to enter into the spirit of Good Friday which shows us that God, however we name or image God, is present in our suffering and pain. God is with us as we face the powerlessness and helplessness of powers beyond our control. We are totally impotent in the face of the emptiness of death and bereavement in whatever guise it comes. But for Christians this is not the whole story for the corollary of this is Resurrection – new life, celebrated symbolically at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. Easter is essentially a celebration of new life, that new life is possible even in the most dark and drastic of situations, that we can have hope and offer it to the world.
​
So the three days ended in joy and hope, in energy and celebration. It was a profound experience, one that brought us back to the essentials of Christianity – equality, mutuality, service, love, interconnectedness, self-abandonment and life in its fullness. Surely the world needs more of this. Religion might seem to be declining but it’s message is a powerful one and if lived out could lead to the transformation of society.