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Last Word - Refugee
I start this month by asking a question which I do not propose to answer. The question is about refugees.
“Who is the most famous refugee you have heard about?
There seems to have been an increase (unless it is my imagination) in the number of refugees and reports about refugees by the media. Some are refugees who have managed to reach countries other than Britain; others have come to this country. Some are immediately accepted as refugees and are given refugee status in this country. Others are judged not to be refugees but simply immigrants and many are judged to be ‘illegal immigrants'.
The description ‘illegal immigrants' is a too wide and not necessarily precise way of referring to people who come to this country without permission and for a variety of reasons. The phrase 'economic migrants' is another imprecise description of people who come here perhaps describing themselves as refugees, but are judged to have come here simply to find work.
This tangle of words, ideas, prejudices, laws – good or bad – is not something I propose to continue discussing in this rather limited space, which is not the place for such a controversial subject. The phrase ‘more heat than light' springs to mind. Since I cannot pretend to have anything constructive to offer – and being a particular kind of immigrant myself – I might end by being told to ‘put up or shut up!' More words more clichés and more tangles.
Alongside the news about world population and its movements, a new kind of space telescope has been launched. It's purpose, it appears, is to allow the universe to be seen in a new way, which it seems will reveal far more about the origins of the universe than we have ever discovered (or thought we have discovered) in the past.
If ever there was anything which should reduce us to humility, the prospect of glimpsing creation in a more revealing way must indeed make us humble. Our claim that the country in which we live in this tiny speck in a vast universe is somehow ‘ours' becomes (in one way) pure folly. Humility should, I suggest, show us how to live in a world which is not ours, but God's world, a part of God's universe. We have been taught how to pray; we perhaps need to learn how to listen.
I feel sure that I have already written something similar or the same. If so, that would perhaps result from realising over many years that God's creation of this beautiful world in which we live gives us cause not only for humility but to care for all creatures, including all people and peoples who have the privilege of living here, in a beautiful creation.
Bob Mclean
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