Pastoral Letter for the Month

The long hot summer has seen quite a bit of work going on in the next door neighbour’s house – which means that the grumpy cat who lives there has been forced to spend more time in our garden. Reluctantly it has adopted a favourite perch, the upturned hull of our fifteen foot canoe.It settles there and looks, discontentedly, across the garden.

I tap a finger on the glass of the window, it looks at me and then immediately looks away as if the very thought of me makes it feel a bit ill. If I go out in to the garden it reluctantly hops down from the canoe, scowls, and stalks off in a huff. If we are in the garden and it needs to transit across the lawn it does so at around thirty miles an hour – almost as if it was jet propelled “It’s like a sort of streak of brown light,” my wife says.

“It just doesn’t like us,” I say.  “I’m not sure it likes anyone,” she replies.

One of the readers of this newsletter sent me a message. “You just leave that cat alone,” it said. “People are siding with the grumpy cat,” I said to my wife. “They sympathise with it. “I suppose,” she said, “it is a sort of refugee.”  “Really?” I said. “Yes, you know, from all the drilling and cutting.”

If the grumpy cat really can be classed as a refugee, which I’m not sure about, then it’s certainly not unique. According to official estimates there are more than 123 million people around the world who have been ‘forcibly displaced’ from their homes.  Of these more than 36 million are officially classed as refugees. Most of the people who have been forcibly displaced are classed as ‘internally displaced’– which means that they’ve lost or been forced to flee from their homes due to conflict, violence, human rights violations or natural disasters, but they’ve not crossed any international border.

In some cases those people are actually worse off, they don’t have the legal protection of being a refugee and remain at the mercy of their governments, even if they were displaced because of that government.  Here in the UK it can be hard to imagine the sort of trauma that would result in having to abandon your home, your belongings, your friends, and try and make a new life somewhere else.  Yet it is, and for a long time has been, part of the human experience. It is even part of the story of Jesus as told by the writer of Matthew’s gospel.  It’s been sad, even quite chilling, to see the kind of language that has been  used in our own country about people who arrive on these shores hoping for a better life.

There were reasons that the writer of Matthew decided to include a story about Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing to Egypt. For one thing he wanted people to see Jesus as a new Moses, the great Israelite hero. He also wanted to refer back to the words in the book of Hosea: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”  Those words actually refer back to the children of Israel leaving Egypt, under Moses’ guidance. In other words, they also speak of a great movement of refugees. The Israelites, enslaved by the Egyptians, packed up their things and left the country, taking their chances in an unknown land.

“I don’t know if people would feel sympathy for the grumpy cat if they knewit,” I said to my wife.  “Maybe they would,” she said. “You just never know.”

Often its easier to feel sympathy and compassion for people and things when we actually get to know them. When all we do is read negative stories in the press, or hear politicians talk provocatively about ‘hordes’ or ‘swarms’. Ultimately we have to remember that they are people, sons and daughters, mums and dads. Everyone was someone’s baby.

As we continue to hear negative stories about desperate people trying to find ways to have a better life, let’s pray that they are treated with the sort of compassion and kindness that we all need.

“So are you going to treat the grumpy cat with compassion?” My wife asked.  “I’m letting it sit on my canoe,” I said. “I think that’s progress.”

Simon