Remember, we are all refugees: Fr Paddy O’Kane
The psalmist sings ‘As the deer yearns for running streams, so do our souls thirst for you, O Lord’.
We have all a hunger for beauty, truth and love.
This world gives us a fleeting taste of these uplifting experiences.
But we know that no matter how wonderful the experience is, it will pass – it cannot last.
It is as if we are being teased.
The poet Wordsworth called these ‘intimations of immortality’ – a hint that there is somewhere beyond this life where they will last in ecstasy forever, a place where lost things are found, where what is broken is fixed and where wounds are healed.
We have seen thousands of refugees and migrants arrive every day on the coast of Europe.
Our hearts go out to them in their state of homelessness and vulnerability.
They have thrown themselves onto the shores of our mercy. Beautiful people yet broken they have nowhere to turn but our pity, not knowing where their children will get neither their next meal nor a bed to lie on.
They are bereft, many hoodwinked and exploited by those traffickers who promised them a better future, ’a land of milk and honey’ as the people of Israel called their promised land.
The Old Testament has many beautiful passages of the time they were deported from their homeland and how in their exile they dreamed of that day when they would return.
The most famous of these passages has been made into a song ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ – it’s there we wept as we remembered Zion.’ All they had to hold on to was the virtue of hope.
As we watch the news we see these migrants hold on to that same life jacket of hope.
We are all refugees, you could say, because our true home is in heaven. We are all in exile bouncing between the waves of desperation, clinging to the life boat of hope, often lost in a sea of sorrow.
We hope that, when the day comes, we will join those who have gone on ahead -The Holy Souls- and where our heavenly Father will say to us ‘Welcome home, come and sit at my right hand. Well done, good and faithful servant’.
St. Augustine puts it well in his often quoted prayer ‘You have made us for yourself O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’. In this sea together tho’ sailing different ways We sing many songs of gladness and of sorrow Coming in with nothing, going out the same We yearn for love and beauty And all this world can offer is so hollow. We turn to you Lord Jesus, we place our hope in you We ask you to lead us home, a place where love is true. Where with the saints and angels, with family and friends, we’ll praise your name forever and our joy will never end.