SANCTUARY: WAYS OF TELLING, WAYS OF DWELLING
by John Battle. Commission Chair
SANCTUARY: WAYS OF TELLING, WAYS OF DWELLING BY MARINA WARNER (2025)
A Heart-warming and encouraging read for our time
A few years ago a paper version of the Leeds Diocesan Justice and Peace newsletter was returned to the office with the words “Jesus was not a refugee!” scrawled across the front page. Apparently, a reference to the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt at a time of political turmoil and fear of King Herod’s cruel infanticide had not gone down well. More recently Cambridge Professor of Philosophy of religion James Orr, “British sherpa” to Vice President JD Vance and adviser to Nigel Farage described asylum seekers as “invaders”. ‘Asylum seeker’ is increasingly used as a term of abuse.
The language surrounding “refugee” and “asylum” is increasingly provoking negative reactions. While it is tempting to stress that historically, as an “island” geographically, it is difficult for anyone to claim they are “natives” and not “incomers”. Celts crossed the Doggerland before the North Sea covered it over. Anglo Saxon was a later holdall term for a range of western European incomers. Romans, Vikings from Scandinavia and Normans all moved as the early years moved into the medieval. Migrations have continued ever since, not least as a consequence of the great British Empire period. Moreover, as palaeontologists Dr Cat Jarman spells out, contrary to popular opinion DNA cannot tell you where your relatives come from.
“What it really tells you is where in the world people matching your genetics are living right now and this does not represent an ancient population. We are a species that has been on the move since day one”.
In other words, DNA can identify specific family relationships but cannot trace local chains of ancestry. In essence we, on this group of islands, are all incomers through time.
So, how have we treated arriving “strangers” ?
The Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales have a strong record of encouraging welcoming the stranger and supporting asylum seekers and refugees as their recent pastoral exhortation “Love the Stranger” demonstrates – in strong theological language and practical proposals for pastoral action in our communities. But the presence of “arrivers” is increasingly contested , whether “legal” or “illegal” and asylum has shifted in meaning from a positive term for a traditional place of refuge to a language of rejectionism ; “asylum seekers are not welcome here”.
But is this true to our island stories and history?
Novelist Marina Warner has published a comprehensively researched account of “sanctuary” in which she explores the history of the principles and practice of “sanctuary” noting in particular the Churches’ contribution symbolised by the medieval door knocker on Durham Cathedral. She seeks out the principles on which the ancient classical and medieval practices of sanctuary were founded in what we strangely still dismiss as the “dark ages”!
She records the ancient traditions of sanctuary from the stories of the classical world offering brief immunity to fugitives from justice through the medieval literature recording sanctuary in churches as places of “sacred reprieve” right up to the present day challenges facing refugees in a political world turning its back on United Nations’ internationally agreed principles of protection, welcome and support.
Nor is Warner’s “Sanctuary” a work of bare legal principles and treaties. Rather it is a heart-warming and encouraging reading journey through literature, poems and personal stories rooted in human experiences of real people, through time, forced to move for survival often because of circumstances beyond their control.
Her “ways of telling” insists on a strong story-shaped world rooted in the particulars of local experiences. Her “ways of dwelling” challenges us to rethink what we mean by “home”, “freedom of movement”, “nations” and developing international relations.
This is a rhizome book taking us through the deep roots of asylum concepts and language and reminding us that in fact we are, as Pope Francis always insisted, “all in it together “and therefore we need to work harder at living together inspired by her “stories in transition”.
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