slow growing compassion

I spent the morning with a friend from Libya who lives in our area.  She and her husband did studies here, coming before the war began in her nation, and now it isn't safe to return.  They've applied for a protection visa and are desperate to stay.  She had her second baby a few weeks ago, the sweetest little girl, and she stays in her tiny flat caring for babies while her engineer husband collects shopping carts at the grocery store six days a week.  She has no complaints, she shows me pictures from home of coffins draped in flags lined up for ages, her sister will give birth there soon.  I love having her in my life - I need her to remind me of realities I quickly forget.  To have your children and your husband safe and with you, with food to eat on the table every single day - these are privileges, this is cause to celebrate and be relieved.  I examine my heart when we kiss goodbye at the door, I scan my small list of woes and let a few of them go.

I read about Syria regularly, I'm eager and terrified to know what life is like for the two million people who have fled across borders with little in their arms but the children they've bore.  I occasionally feel unsafe in my neighbourhood but those moments are fleeting and there's so much help available if I actually needed it.  I really cannot imagine feeling perpetually unsafe, and even worse, to know that my children weren't safe.  I can't imagine having to risk everything, leave the trees my family had tended for hundreds of years and travel under the cover of darkness.  I can't imagine how living in a tent in the desert in a foreign place could some how be safer than the house in which I was born.

Imagining these things is hard.  But I think it's part of caring, it's part of slow growing compassion, it's part of quiet prayer.  It's part of joining our thoughts into the collective longing for deliverance: from violence, from hatred, from power and division and suffering.

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'I believe that Christ came not to dispel the darkness but to teach us
to dwell with integrity, compassion, and love in the midst of
ambiguity.  The one who grew in the fertile darkness of Mary's womb
knew that darkness is not evil of itself.  Rather, it can become the
tending place in which our longings for healing, justice and peace
grow and come to birth.' - Jan L. Richardson

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City of the Lost - David Remnick for The New Yorker
 - an intense article about the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, which has quickly become the second largest camp in the world