The practice of sanctuary
Craig Barnett writes about Quaker support for refugees and asylum seekers
British Quakers have been deeply involved in supporting refugees since the seventeenth century, when they welcomed Protestants who were escaping religious persecution in France. Before the second world war, Friends played a crucial role in the Kindertransport, which rescued thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Germany. Today, many British Quakers are welcoming refugees into their homes and their lives, and supporting them as befrienders, advocates, teachers and campaigners.
Over recent decades the UK has increasingly resorted to dehumanising and violent methods for the enforcement of national borders. Arbitrary and indefinite detention, enforced destitution and forcible deportations have become instruments of policy, deliberately designed to create a ‘hostile environment’ to deter potential migrants. These are policies that make trauma and abuse inevitable, and that have led directly to the deaths of people seeking sanctuary in the UK by suicide and unlawful killing.
In the eighteenth century, Quaker abolitionists such as John Woolman struggled against the ‘spirit of oppression’ that made some human beings into slaves for the wealth and comfort of others. I believe the same spirit is at work today in our treatment of people seeking sanctuary. They are our own society’s ‘non-persons’; victims of violence and abuse, detained without trial, or made destitute without the right to work.
By steadily removing people who are seeking sanctuary from the basic services and legal protection of the rest of society, and making them into a target for violence and persecution, we have created a new underclass of systematically violated people.
The Quaker experience is that friendship with excluded people is sacramental. Offering sanctuary is an act of faith; a statement of hope in the possibilities of human solidarity. Through friendship with people who are seeking sanctuary, many Quakers have discovered a view of society from the perspective of those who do not count, those who are rejected and dehumanised by official policy.
These relationships of solidarity bring light to the hidden places where the violence of the immigration system is usually concealed; in detention centres, hostels and immigration courts. By illuminating the darkest corners of our society, and opening up new possibilities of unity and friendship, the practice of sanctuary expresses the transformative power of the divine Light, which ‘shows us our darkness and brings us to new life’ (Advices & queries 1).
By defending the humanity and dignity of people who are seeking sanctuary, Friends keep alive the vision of a society that is open to friendship across barriers of race, culture, wealth and nationality. By refusing to accept the division of humanity by nationality and immigration status, the practice of sanctuary reveals and celebrates the divine ground and potential of human community.
Like the practice of Quaker worship, the practice of sanctuary is ‘a celebration of the continual resurrection within us of the springs of hope and love; a sense that each of us is, if we will, a channel for a power that is both within us and beyond us’ (Lorna M Marsden, Quaker faith & practice 20.16).
Friendship with people seeking sanctuary reminds us that the heart of the Quaker way is a spirituality of hospitality. The Quaker practices of worship and discernment develop our capacity to welcome the life and activity of the Spirit in our lives, to make a home for the ‘promptings of love and truth’, even when they are unfamiliar or challenging.
The practice of the Quaker way enables us to become people who are willing to open ourselves to the unsettling presence and unexpected gifts of the Other.
