When we provide a refuge, who finds salvation?
There鈥檚 a story about a huge storm lashing the beaches of a coastal region with so much fury that thousands upon thousands of star-fish were washed up and left to die in the dehydration of the next day鈥檚 sun. Walking along the beach in the morning, overwhelmed by the soon to be dried out and dead lying upon rock and sand, a wandering couple surprised a man bending to pick up and place stranded sea stars in the water.
鈥淵ou cannot possibly鈥� they said, 鈥渟ave all of these.鈥�
鈥淢aybe not,鈥� he replied, bending to the task, 鈥渂ut I can make a difference for this one.鈥�
I think of this story at moments when the numbers of humans left stranded by war and geo-politics threaten to overwhelm me. When I consider the marginal effectiveness and huge resources required to bring even one refuge-seeking family to safety. Our congregation at Duncan United is coordinating one such effort and I know how much it has taken for our community to respond. Agencies, businesses, schools, churches, and many, many individuals freely giving of their time, their finances, their goods and their services. So many engaged in doing so much for one small family. Parents and children, set adrift in Lebanon, now becoming members of our community in the Cowichan.
Really, it would make much more sense for us to convince the world鈥檚 governments and corporations to stop the deprivation and terror causing so many to pack up their children and flee for their lives. Not only in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, but wherever events force people to flee their homes. Events the world鈥檚 governments and corporations have a great deal to do with in the first place.
However, political parties, social justice movements, humanitarian organizations, churches and even some billionaires with consciousness, have been doing their best to change our ways for a very long time, with little discernable effect.听 On the broader, corporate, geopolitical level, we seem stuck in a paradigm that requires us to over-power others and bend them to our will. No matter the cost.
Perhaps then, our individual mobilizations in towns, villages and neighbourhoods throughout the country are the only way we can effect the change we wish to see in the world. Meeting the living, breathing, 鈥榦ther鈥� in the person of families fleeing to our arms, we find ourselves appreciating their essential humanity, their beloved-ness in and of our common creation. An appreciation overcoming the fear and unknowing that allowed our support of their destabilization in the first place.
With such a new and heart-felt understanding, with so much love outpoured in service and care and unconditional support, who knows where we might end up. Could our governments and corporations become projections of ourselves? Could our newly heightened awareness of our responsibility and care for one-another be extended to others who are marginalized within our communities? Could we become aware that the ancient teachings of our ancestors in faith were not predictions of a time to be, but a time already present?
In the words of the one we know as the Light of our Christian faith, the time to bring freedom to the captives, sight to the blind and restoration to the marginalized is now. Might it be that in supporting the dislocation of so many, we have also opened an awareness of refuge in our hearts, minds, bodies and souls? A refuge we share in the ground of all being? A refuge in the grace of love?
May it be so.
Keith Simmonds, a听diaconal minister, Keith serves at Duncan United Church, and as President of the BC Conference of the United Church of sa国际传媒. Blogging at 听he听can also be found at听Views expressed here are his own, and not necessarily those of the church.听
You can read more article on our interfaith blog, Spiritually Speaking,
* This article was published in the print edition of the TImes Colonist on Saturday, February 27 2016
