Scarred

My work at the Sanctuary often brings me great joy. It is a privilege to witness the human capacity for hope, and to be surrounded by gestures of sharing, compassion and welcome.

But there are also times when the suffering of the world leaves me feeling exhausted, frustrated and deeply, deeply sad. There are times when I am ashamed of my country's hostile response to the desperate suffering of those who come pleading for help.

There are times where I feel I can make a tangible difference to people's lives. There are times where I know that I can't: when all I can offer is an apology for my country's failings and possibly a hug which might or might not soften the blow.

There is a very fine balance between the necessary resilience of self-care and the risk of becoming hardened or indifferent to the realities of everyday tragedies.

It is so very easy to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the injustices that surround us and by the seeming impermeability of the systems and structures we have created to protect ourselves from the vulnerability of real human relationships with those beyond our immediate circle. But it is always the individual stories, even those which are very hard to hear, which remind me something of the value of our human lives, and which teach me that our own humanity is irrevocably scarred if we ignore the humanity of the other. Inevitably, some stories, some people somehow effect me more deeply than others; there isn't always a rational logic as to which ones and why.

These moments of encounter pierce my protective shell and enable both laughter, and tears, to well up inside. I hope they always will.

I will be for ever indebted to those who are helping me to learn what it means to be fully human and fully alive.

She arrived to this

Much-vaunted civilisation

Bastion of freedom and democracy

A promised land

Of barbed wire and locked doors

Of detention and deprivation

Of hostility and suspicion

Her tired, shattered body

Confined for the crime

Of believing she had the right

To life

A life

Still mired in memories

Of love and loss

But which dares to dream

Of the healing of aching anguish

And of wings of freedom

We are all

The sum of our stories

The confused and disjointed

The incomplete and incoherent

The wretchedly real

But we took her scarred body

And we refused to believe

After all she has known

It is this

The lack of faith

In her humanity

Which slowly scars her soul

Wings of freedom

Clipped and crumpled

By a system designed to devastate

And yet

Threatened and hesitant

Still she tries

To smile through the tears

Clinging, by fragile finger-tips

To hope

And stretching out

Those beautiful, broken wings

Wondering

Where can I go?