One last post from the Calais Jungle, soon to be published in the LCW newsletter.
I met a young man in the Calais hospital, His heavily bandaged hand looked painful, He was sunk into the bedclothes, his skin grey. How had he hurt his hand? ‘Dougar’ he said. As one of the volunteers, a refugee himself, chatted to him in his own language, he brightened up a bit, realised he was being offered food, clothes.
The road to the port crosses over the entrance to the Jungle camp and continually there is the skyline of the lorries trundling left to right towards the ferry, to England. Any picture of the camp taken from a high spot in the dunes has this line of traffic on the horizon. Between the embankment of the road and the camp is a kind of ‘maidan’ where people play cricket and football. But this is also the place where police throw tear gas to stop people running up the bank.
For me visiting the Jungle camp was certainly biblical. Every morning at Maria Skobtsova House community I listened to the scriptures read aloud in English, French and Farsi. The voices cracked as if the readers realised the poignancy of the words.
As the self determined nature of the camp revealed itself to me, with its ancient seeming organisations and its communal nature, the bible readings became more and more alive. People there, I was told, were used to living in large groups. Even if they collected food aid in individual portions, they would put the food together onto one communal plate and eat it together, according to their custom.
While I deeply welcomed the daily readings and prayer in three languages, in the Jungle my faith was being tested, in the classic fashion. How can there be a god while such things happen? It was a nudging doubt in my head, that I’d never heard before.
Shortly before I went to Calais, I attended the refugees welcome rally in Parliament Square, with my daughter, my husband, friends and relatives. It is our moral duty, the rally said hopefully, to care for each refugee or indeed each person who comes to us in need. At the same time the media reported the death of an Afghan boy who already had permission to come to the UK, who was killed on the ‘dougar’, the traffic jam of lorries lining up for the port in Calais. I was shocked at the vitriol and anger on social media that followed both the rally and this incident, It made me think people are afraid. They are unable to cope with the idea of their duty to each refugee. And so they should be. People are afraid on both sides of the channel.
This is when Abraham, the father of faith, sprung into my mind. God told Abraham to take his only son Isaac up Mount Moria, with a knife, fire wood tied to a donkey. Many writers, Bob Dylan, Kierkegaard, Derrida have looked to this moment for truths about religion, faith, sacrifice. Derrida, in the Gift of Death, spends a lot of time looking at the moment when God stops Abraham from killing his son. It is an impossible moment, he says, neither present or future, not graspable. It is the moment when there is no longer an exchange. Abraham leaves oikonomia, the normal relations of home and existence, work, to take his son up the mountain. His son in which all his hope for the future of his descendants lies. God tells him to.
Simon Jones, a Baptist minister, who has been visiting the Jungle for many years, tells me people in the Jungle don’t think in terms of an individual life and death, or of searching for a better life for themselves. Instead it is a moment of seeking for life itself. It is survival for them but also for the future of their family, their descendants. Families or communities in Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Eritrea, places where existence – not daily life/job/mortgage as we think of it, but the very existence for them and their family – has become impossible. They see that there is no future. They send their children to Europe, send money, stay in contact through Whatsapp, just as Abraham collected the firewood, took the knife, loaded up the donkey to climb Mount Moria.
When Abraham lifts the knife, God stops him. Then God promises Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the grains of sand on the beach or stars in the sky.
Abraham was travelling looking for a place for his people. His only son Isaac represents his hopes for the future, for his people’s very existence. In the moment of sacrifice, when he raises the knife to sacrifice Isaac, he is following God’s orders. God speaks to him.
This is the terrifying moment when God speaks to us. An impossible moment of right now this minute, neither past nor future, according to Derrida. God is speaking to us. There is the moment between climbing on a lorry and not being on the lorry, falling. Through the deaths on the Calais ‘rocade’.
God is speaking to us from the ‘dougar’ and from the jungle camp. If we listen we will save our sons and daughters our brothers and sisters. Like Abraham we can stay the knife. This is Isaac on the ‘dougar’. God is telling us to sacrifice Isaac and rescue him both at the same time.
No wonder we are frightened. No wonder the tabloid press have debased themselves. I’ve spent enough time on the street handing out leaflets to know that when people come and abuse me, say ‘get a job, lesbian hippy’, it’s because they are frightened not of me but of the reminder that we collectively are doing something very, very wrong. They are just turning away their faces from what God is telling us, or not even God, but what the situation is telling us about ourselves. We are not welcoming; we are vain and greedy and selfish and lazy. Worst of all we lack faith. We are so afraid our government is building a wall, another folly, the trucks loaded with spoil from building the wall trundling backwards and forwards near the camp. We have so many different ways in which to display our lack of faith!
I remember Luke’s gospel. Each sparrow is precious, no one is more or less. Each one is precious to God. I can’t meet all of them. For us weaklings, we can only speak to a few people at a time, meet a few people at a time, however heroic.
The young man in hospital with his injured hand, becomes precious, come out of the sky mist, become stars. But I can’t meet all of them, Secours Catholique can’t meet all of them. Instead we need to have faith like Abraham.
Henrietta Cullinan 