By Morwenna Ludlow, Canon Theologian
This time last year my husband and I were frantically packing things up in cases and boxes as we prepared for our move to Germany for six months. It was a wonderful time away: we were working as researchers attached to the University of Mainz but we had plenty of time at weekends and holidays to explore the very beautiful Rhineland and further afield. Nevertheless, this year we are quite glad not to be doing such a lot of packing and preparation!
As I look back to that time of travel last year I am struck how exciting but also exhausting it is to prepare for a trip when you don’t quite know where you are going to live. We had arranged to rent a flat for visiting scholars on the university campus, and we did have some photos and a list of what was in the kitchen, but apart from that we had little idea of what it would be like. In the end, of course, it was fine (and we even survived the lack of a washing-machine). How much worse to travel with no idea where you will lay your head for the next night, let alone the next six months.
It’s also exciting and exhausting to get used to living in a new country. For the first few weeks, you are constantly working out where places are, what things are called and how things work. Germany and Britain are both northern European countries and many things are almost the same – but it’s that deceptive ‘almost’ that lulls you into a false sense of security and trips you up, much to the amusement/impatience/incredulity of those you are dealing with. The fact that our German was only so-so when we arrived didn’t help. We spent the last three months incredulously wondering, ‘How did we survive without knowing what the word for that was?’. How bewildering it must be when you can hardly speak and read the language at all.
So, as I look ahead to next year, I hope that we can be better at showing compassion for those who are new arrivals in our communities, whether they are from the next town or county or from much further away. We don’t know their stories when they arrive; we owe it to them to listen. But compassion is like a muscle that needs to be exercised: it’s not without effort and we can help each other by exercising our compassion muscles together. For those of us in Christian faith communities, it is well to remember that Jesus and his family were refugees (at Epiphany we will remember not just the visit of the Magi, but the holy family’s flight to Egypt). And in the gospels, Jesus asks us to receive the vulnerable, because in doing so we will be receiving Him (Matt. 18:5; 25:35).
–––
Image: non-copyright: No. 20 Scenes from the Life of Christ: 4. Flight into Egypt; 1304-06; Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua; available via this site.