Be amazed at their journey, be surprised by their courage.

 The cooking stoves they left are cold and empty, the warm taste of bread is no more their Eucharist.

 The only fires that burn consume the fabric of their homes, amid the acrid smell of smoke. Children’s toys and books lie strewn, the unmade bed, sheets darkened by the foetid air and dust, is empty. Their legacy of the past torn away, broken with the shattered shards of splintered glass.

 A heavy bag shouldered against a man’s bent neck, the shadow of stubble and the sweat of tears. The young child carried against its mother’s breast, her anxious eyes glance down as her protective hand cradles her baby’s face. Between here and there they travel a crowded road, headed North, across open land.

 Still they come, knocking at the door of Europe , men, women, children, dishevelled and tired.

 In a practical move, Francis has asked parishes, abbeys and other religious foundations across the continent, to open their doors and take these refugees in from the streets. If you did this to the least of your brothers, you did it for me.

 The weather is beginning to turn. The heat of Summer is gone. Autumn, with its chill winds and rain is upon us. Now the pictures we see through the media are of rain soaked ground, muddy fields and families trying to gain protection from flimsy sheets of plastic or light weight raincoats. They have survived thus far, but how much further can they struggle on?

 As in every such exodus of people down the ages, it is hard for the young children and for pregnant women. Eliot opens his poem ‘Journey of the Magi’  with these words:

“A hard coming we had of it, just the worst time of year for a journey, and such a long journey”.  Did they know what it would be like when they started out? Has the hardship of the journey been too high a price to pay for the hope of safety and security? Have those of us who look on any idea of what it has been like, what they have gone through? The tear-filled nights, the hunger, the heat of the sun and now the cold and damp?  I very much doubt it.

 Yet the contrasting joy for those who make it, who find themselves secure, safe and welcomed, is all too evident. This picture of a young girl taken when she arrived at Munich rail station is as graphic in its joy as was the grief of a three year old boy, face down on the sand, washed in by the tide after losing his life at sea.

 We cannot, must not, ignore their hands, their voices, their smiles and tears. Let us break bread together on our knees.

END

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