On Refuge: Naming the Asylum Seeker

I like to take photographs of people with their dogs, and when I meet an interesting dog, once I’ve asked if I can take the photo, I always ask the dog’s name, but I never ask the person’s name. I meet these dogs in all kinds of places, and sometimes I wonder whether anyone I know will sometime recognise the person. Well, last week it happened. One of my friends recognised a fellow tennis player! This placed the dog’s owner in a context: a person with a name, a past (in his case playing tennis, rather well I gather) and quite possibly a future.

            From a tennis-playing dog owner to a fleeing asylum seeker may seem a leap of the imagination, but for me the common factor is the name. Linguistics is an interesting science, and like many sciences it’s also an art form, which can be practiced with subtlety by those who wish to conceal what they’re actually doing. One of the problems with the treatment of refugees (those who are fleeing) is the language used to describe them, in particular the official language.

            Getting onto a plane for international travel requires a passport, on which is written your name (writing is most important) which links you to other persons and places, probably to large swathes of your past, and very possibly to a future. Getting onto a boat chartered by persons for carrying cargo may not be such a precise venture. This lays refugees open to the possibility of becoming nameless.

            Official language tends to treat people in groups. Leila and her children, fleeing (by the only means available) from the distinct likelihood of getting shot, have a place, a past, a context, a family; often a religious affiliation; a nationality, race, or ethnicity which may contribute to the likelihood of getting shot: in short, they have individual human lives symbolised by their names. They’re running from a present danger — run, Leila, run! — towards a future where, like you and I, they hope to live in peace.

            Why don’t we say, “Leila got onto this boat because there was no other way out; Leila came from this town, a long way, through much peril; Leila’s dream is to educate her children, and she can’t do that if they’re shot dead.” Why do we say instead: “Another boat full of asylum seekers (plural), economic refugees (plural), victims of people smugglers (plural) is sinking and must not be rescued; if anyone drowns they can’t be retrieved and honourably buried; if anyone is brought out alive we have an arrangement with a foreign country to stow the cargo there.” With or without a passport, official language promotes namelessness.

            I’ve just read Chamberlain’s “The Philosophy Steamer,” the story of Lenin’s international exile of Russian intellectuals (not only philosophers, but poets, agricultural experts, economists, literary figures, religious thinkers, and other academics) in 1922, creating a class of ‘boat people’ who were sent to Berlin by arrangement with the Weimar government which desperately needed money. (Unlike Stalin, Lenin shot only a proportion of those who disagreed with him; it was early days in the Russian Revolution).

            When a government makes an arrangement with a foreign country to house people who belong to us, we can understand more clearly what’s actually going on by following the money. Chamberlain notes that “Chancellor Wirth disdained the idea that Germany be seen the world over as a second Siberia. But, war-ravaged and diplomatically cold-shouldered, his country was committed to helping Russia in exchange for the gifts of Rapallo, which included Most Favoured Nation trading status and extensive trade agreements, plus cancellation of war debts and pre-war claims. Germany did not have much scope to say no.”[i]

            The academics sent out of Russia by the Russian government obviously belonged to Russia. But I’m saying that Leila and her children, who appeal to us for our help, belong to us by the very reason of that appeal. Leila is seeking refuge, a quintessentially religious act.

            The Buddhist liturgy — if that’s the correct word — states: “I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (or, the teachings), and the Sangha (or, community).” Christians take refuge in the Trinity: the Father, the Son (or, the Word), and the Holy Spirit (which informs and interpenetrates the community known as the church universal). According to Panikkar God, humanity, and the world cannot be separated from one another. One always takes refuge, ultimately, in a community. And this community is bounded by the whole world. Therefore, Leila is entitled to our protection. She takes refuge in us, the community, and it would honour us, as our privilege and responsibility, to provide that refuge.

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[i] Chamberlain, Lesley, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (London: Atlantic, 2006), p. 85.

On Anger: A Trip up the Eastern.

It takes only a small event to tip over a possible, if tight, morning into a confrontation with too many neighbours and too little temper. One of the dogs was unexpectedly sick and needed dosing at the last minute before I left for a medical appointment in the city. Now would be the time for the sixteen lights to be passed before the freeway entrance to all be green, but are they? Worse yet, the light board on the Eastern informed me that a twenty minute trip would today take forty minutes, and the clogged traffic confirmed that diagnosis. At points during the trip the light board actually went backwards, and the prognosis of twenty minutes remaining became twenty-five. The temper got shorter and shorter.

            Now surely these delays are outside my control. So why so much anger? Underneath the anger is fear, in this case fear of spending a long time in the medical suite having missed my appointment and having to wait for the next person to be seen before me, thus putting me late for a series of commitments throughout the day. Underneath anger is usually fear, under even the anger of grief, although in that case what one is afraid of has already happened. I can’t control these delays, but I can control my behaviour, and let a neighbour into the lane in front of me: the little baby suit hanging in their rear window prompting further reflection.

            I recently read of the insatiable anger of a mother whose month-old baby had died, such grief and anger that people flinched from the furnace of her unrelenting sorrow and passion of mourning. Such sadness that to hear of it must fill any feeling soul with compassion. It made me think of the description of life as a vale of tears, a common description in past times when infant mortality was a large part of life, when infectious disease and random events put mortality at all ages in your face, so to speak, and when the preciousness of unstable life, hanging always by a thread, was evident and honoured in our worship.

            If due to grief life could be seen as a vale of tears, it could also be seen as a realm of fire, as the Buddha described it in his Fire Sermon: everything burning with birth, aging, death; with desire, hatred, suffering, with sorrow, pain, despair; the eye, the ear, the body, the intellect, everything aflame. The Buddha advised his audience of monks to seek dispassion, and that’s easier said than done. Passion, of course, is the word we use to describe the sufferings of Christ, who submitted to the anger of others to free the world, not from grief, but from death. As long as we feel attachment we must feel grief, and who would be wholly without loves?

            So then at last we passed the truck accident, the police and all the wreckage, and the traffic, having partaken of the events of the morning started to flow. I’d reach my appointment after all. All angers are not the same: some are much larger than others. I wrote this blog during my trip up the Eastern. Then I grabbed my goods off the floor where they spilled when I slammed on the brakes and raced to the medical suite to hear the latest news about my health.

On Living Water: Notes on a Thesis Crisis

It’s a different experience, being the first person to enter the pool in the morning, breaking the still water with my presence. Usually when I arrive, the pool is crowded with others of us, who are in ill-health, or disabled, or old, and need the warm water to bear us up as we take our prescribed exercises. The pool was large, flat, and quiet, but once I slipped into the water, I could hear the ripple and rush of the water moving against the sides. It only appeared to be still.

            Soon others joined me, creating little waves as we walked across and across, and I thought about living water, the kind of water Jesus promised the woman at the well, which is naturally still water. Living water is, simply, flowing water, water in motion. And because I was there on a Sunday, unusual for me, I had an encounter I couldn’t have foreseen, that answered a question that had vexed and confused me for some time.

            The first person who slipped into the pool after me was Katherine, a former university administrator who is now visiting the pool every day to address the consequences of her Parkinson’s symptoms. She’s a very positive person, and I found myself discussing my dilemma with her. My MA thesis faced a crisis not long ago, as one of the two external examiners had set conditions I couldn’t possibly meet. My supervisor was alarmed, and my university was unhappy. They had set before me the possibility of a way to complete the thesis nevertheless.

            I felt very isolated in attempting to make this decision. I would still have to make revisions based on the other examiner’s concerns, but the more I looked at him, the more reasonable and indeed necessary was his advice. Yet my health was in question, and I decided to put off any action until I saw my specialist and knew not only the current status of my illness but how much medication I was likely to be dosed with while I attempted to revise the thesis. I lacked motivation. I thought, if only I could have someone to talk to about this, someone who could help me think it through. Someone not involved with the process.

            The meeting with Katherine was astonishing. She wanted to talk about the thesis! She knew all about the subject matter (having gone to a Catholic school) and spoke warmly of one of her teachers, a nun who had recently died but who had left her legacy of inquiring thought with Katherine for the rest of her life. You must imagine this conversation lasting over an hour as we walk through the water, back and forth across the pool. Katherine convinced me that it was important to go on with the thesis.

            How could I know that a visit to the pool would answer my anxieties and restore my motivation? How could I know that I would meet someone entirely unexpected who would know so much about what I was doing? I had felt so alone, low, and uninspired only the day before. I hadn’t prayed: I had only wished for someone to talk to. The living water comes that way: through the unexpected person or event. And everything begins to flow again.

           

On Images: The Poetic Garden

This week I attended a lecture on the aesthetics of Japanese gardening, and although I was in an auditorium with some eighty-five other adults, I found myself back in the classroom partaking of a ritual well known to me from my years at Uni as a student of Art History: the slide show, as it was called then. Back in the day, I used to have nightmares about slide shows, because examinations consisted of identifying images with their accompanying dates, and I slept through many nights of getting all the dates wrong. This lecturer was as much interested in the sound as in the image, and very little interested in the date, a new and fresh approach.

            In Christianity, the sound that accompanies the image is usually the Word, which is for many accompanied by fear, though also in many cases by consolation. But who can fear the sound of a small waterfall, 10 cm drop I’m told, plashing into the stream in the garden at the Katsura Remote Palace? In addition to the landscape of the eye, a soundscape inhabits the world alongside it. And in sound and sight, the seasons come into play, the young season across the old, and the resting season hidden with the new. There’s the sound of the preacher’s grandchildren, feet of the future clattering over the church floorboards across his voice explicating the Word.

            Sound speaks of change, and as all worldly matters are subject to constant change, sound is particularly apt to a Buddhist perception of the garden. Images might seek to stop time, or at least to prevent it from deteriorating so quickly: a photograph fixes a moment in time, while an icon enters the viewer into a timeless realm, where the sacred story is not subject to change. It gives a taste of eternity as a changeless dimension.

            Although we still hold to the symbolism of the unchanging sun, we know the sun is subject to its own storms and mutable in its own way. All gardens acknowledge the seasons, each leaf and colour unrepeatable yet consonant with the pattern of repeating life. The Japanese garden, though, is inspired by the moon, moon reflecting the hidden presence of sun through its tour across the evening sky, and altering colours and textures from their apparentness in the solar day.

            This changed perception of colour and texture on plant and pavement and stone is meant to give rise to poetry. The garden is a poetry-writing garden. Every drop of the seasons and every splash of moonlight on the earthly realm may be noted as a reflection of truth. And this poetry is meant to be shared, as people gather in groups to admire the evanescence of the garden’s elements.

            What if our worship was a poem, taking into account seasons, sun, moon, bridges, doorways, silences, sounds? What if every one of us had to write one? Life as a poem: life in the garden.

           

Weird Theology: The Place of Your Regret

About once a month I revisit a town where once I lived for nearly 30 years. This gives me a chance to observe the process of change: the jazz café is gone, the shops are getting more chic, the buildings are modernised and styled up. It makes me confront the truth the Buddha pronounced: change is constant, inevitable, and even from moment to moment nothing remains stable or still.

            Why, then, so many regrets for my less attractive actions of ten, twenty or even more years ago? The part I played and the place I occupied in the net the Norsemen knew as Weird: the filaments binding together everything on the face of the earth, so that the actions of one affect others even into distant times and places. There’s no way to go back and fulfil that commitment that bitterly disappointed someone when I let myself become so exhausted that I bowed out of what I saw as a voluntary exercise. If I’d been able to foresee the end that came to that person, would I have acted differently? Would I have that power, given the state both physical and mental I had attained by self-neglect?

            And then there were the flashes of temper, aimed at people who turned up unexpectedly, when I wasn’t concentrating on my behaviour but only on my goals. There were mistakes of judgement, leading to suffering for animals and people. My sorrow can’t take away the pain my dog carried because I didn’t stay with him for that rough examination at the vet, for example, although he lived well and was loved for many years afterwards: I still have my regrets. If we could see the end, would we be able to act differently? Maybe I’m thinking of a morality of mortality.

            Ignatius seems to indicate that when in desolation we should revisit the possibility of consolation, and in this context it’s good to remember the many times I did support the one I disappointed and the best of care I gave my beloved dog throughout his life: the happy times I had with them. The net of Weird does consist of good as well as doubtful actions. But there’s real pain in letting others down and no recourse except forgiveness. The dear human heart, so easily bruised by changes and separations, continues to beat to the pattern established through our thoughts and actions.

            In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he makes reference to the mutable (or changeable) that must become immutable: changeless. On the face of it, this is impossible, given the nature of the world, yet Paul implies that this would be no voluntary process, but the result of a divine fiat. I think the activity of forgiveness, incarnated in Jesus Christ, is all that can still our joys and our regrets, knowing that we can’t know all consequences, but that the point of balance can be found. We live eternally in the presence of the forgiveness of sins, yet too often we forget this, and self-forgiveness is the hardest task of all.