Asylum and safety 

Seeking asylum is a natural part of human life.

We want to retreat. Find sanctuary. Be held in safety. Wrapped in warmth. 

To disappear from the tugs and pulls of life.

Today we in the privileged world are learning about asylum from an invisible threat. 

To shelter at home. To be safe.

Perhaps in our retreat, we might consider the Pattern Integrity of asylum and what it means to feel safe.

For there are those who find no safety at home. Their houses, nations, cities…are violent places.

And yet these people, rather than being offered asylum, are treated as pariahs. 

My heart breaks for a world that is so caught in fear that we have squeezed compassion from our politics. 

We have placed safety on the altar of righteousness at the cost of all human dignity.

As a virus rages it exposes the fault lines in our agreements towards each other as humans.

April 30th 2020

Photo taken April 30th, 2020