Jean Fontanieu

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

The wars in the Middle East have thrown onto the roads and the seas a very large number of men, women and children who are seeking refuge in safer countries. This recent inflow is giving rise to fears and tensions in the countries which welcome them. We must overcome these anxieties.

Probably no political question has been as fraught as the question of migration; it lies around indeed in the cardboard boxes of our hidden anxieties, fed by recurring, but distant news items, placed centre-stage by any politician in need of an audience; but deep down, we scarcely believed it, clad as we are in the humanist certainty inherited from the Enlightenment. And then, shutting our eyes and ears, we would persuade ourselves that the police, would do their job, closing our borders, sending enough people back to their own country; and if a few of them remained in our estates, they would simply melt away into the landscape…

And all at once the phenomenon picks up speed, and society becomes inflamed; as a consequence of a dramatic chain of risky geopolitical decisions, because of Arab springs which barely blossomed and are already closed again, because of dictators who pushed what seemed acceptable a little too far, they have arrived, fleeing en masse the lands where the future is no longer put in writing.

They are there, at our doors, shouting their despair, and we are there, with our outdated models, our buried fears, our broken-down software.

How do we get past this blockage? How do we arrive at a new understanding in which migrations will be only a temporary phenomenon? To mention a few perspectives…

Fear of the other

This is probably the most ancient reflex, but also the most tenacious; it is written in our history, as so many repetitions which we see linked together, despite the evidence of the disasters and the conflicts which this feeling generates.

Accepting difference can only happen with the discovery and the understanding that the other is the same face of ourselves; the face of God is multiple, reflecting our humanity, but it is also homogeneous, that is to say that we can recognise ourselves in it, as in a mirror, from whatever angle we may view it; it is in the experience, the encounter, that this discovery can be made; and then we see that the stranger eats like us, smiles like us, suffers like us, dies like us. Students on the Erasmus programme often report that they are staggered to see how their European neighbours, often from several thousand Km away, joke about the same topics! Let us organise sessions of international caricatures! Let us multiply the « exotic » meals which will tell better than our speeches how very alike are our taste-buds.

 

The question of the space of our tents

While the « global village” takes on objective characteristics, it seems that our mental space shrinks as our ability to travel, to consume « different » increases. A paradox of globalisation? More profoundly, perhaps, the observation that the temptation to withdraw is always at work, as if this reductive reflex were one of our profound characteristics… But no, the universe is expanding, life spreads, cells open out, seeds travel! What then? Why this denial of natural movement? The hope to which we turn down access, perhaps because trust has shrunk… Too many lies, too many crimes have eroded this trust.

What paradigm change is needed?

How to combine from then on the parameters in order to advance a little better? How to foil the curses of crises which announce catastrophes?

Education, certainly, in first place of all; from the earliest years to live sharing, to invite, to take risks, to explain, to laugh together, to de-dramatise; but also to start small, to show human beings and their intelligence, to celebrate life in its abundance and difference, to understand all the options, to teach tolerance…

Next comes practice: unconditional welcome, trust in tomorrow, carefree living, showing our children that the other is a true brother [or sister]; to exchange our knowledge, our habits and customs; to open the windows more, and we shall feel the cold less…

To live dispossession and to show its benefits: there we shall gain a greater tranquillity, without losing satisfaction; the cult of consumption is no stranger to fear of the stranger: they can take our goods, we who lack so many of them, and if we have fewer, what will they come to take from us?

Then to engage with refuting deadly speeches, to sort through our media, to look for good news; to travel with fewer safety nets, ears and eyes wide open, without worrying too much about comfort or what the food is like…

At this price will our brother [or sister] on earth perhaps be a little less threatening? Will we perhaps find it normal that our frontier posts are no more than markers, and not obstacles? At the time when there have never been so many walls built across the world, might we remember that they have always crumbled, one day or another, not without having brought ruin to the interior.

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