When we think of refugees, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the numbers and bad news. Nine million people, more than a third of Australia’s population, have been driven from home in Sudan; most of the population of Gaza has been displaced; people have fled violence, starvation and poverty throughout the world; and governments in wealthy nations have increasingly treated refugees as less than human. Bad news comes in floods that can leave us despairing or apathetic.

The theme of Refugee Week (16–22 June) this year invites us to reflect on family and finding freedom. It draws our minds and hearts away from the tyranny of numbers to the lives of the women, men and children we call refugees. It invites us to see them from inside and to listen to the stories of their flight from the places and communities they called home. We may be awed by the passion for life and freedom that led them to seek life elsewhere, may celebrate the resilience that they have shown as they walked such a hard road, and may wonder at their devotion to family in the face of all the crises that test it.

We may also celebrate the kindness of strangers they have met along the way: the people who offered them shelter and food, welcomed them, helped them to settle in a strange new country and reached out to them in friendship on their long journey. These are the gifts that we would like our families to receive in hard times. They are also the qualities that we would like think are characteristic of our own nation. Refugee Week invites us to celebrate these qualities in those who treat others not as strangers but as sisters and brothers in the world family.

Refugees are not a problem, but persons who have great problems.

Throughout the month on June, Pope Francis also invites us to pray especially ‘for migrants fleeing their homes’, that those ‘fleeing from war or hunger, forced to undertake journeys full of danger and violence, find welcome and new opportunities in the countries that receive them.’

While he does not specifically mention refugees, he certainly has them in mind when he speaks of those who have been ‘forced to undertake journeys full of danger and violence’. Not all, however, would fit the legal definition of refugees. Pope Francis typically focuses on persons and not on the categories into which we place them. The experience of fleeing from war and hunger is traumatic for all human beings, whether we call them refugees or not, and doubly so when they find no hospitality at the end of their journey.

Pope Francis’ prayer intention invites us to take our attention away from the big abstractions of war and its supposed justifications, and from refugee policy and its exclusions. We are instead to focus on the human experience of those who have fled death and homelessness, who have lost children and been wounded, who face starvation, lack of medicine and new fears of attack, and who are excluded from their own country and from neighbouring nations.

We may be able to do little to relieve their suffering. To pray for them, however, keeps them in our hearts, minds and conversations, and perhaps may also flow into the policies of our government. Refugees are commonly seen as a problem. They are not a problem, but persons who have great problems. To live fully human lives, they call for our attention, our understanding, our compassion and our generosity. For Christians these responses flow out of and into prayer. To dwell in prayer on the images that we see in the news may help us enter their experience and long to change it.

Refugee week is a time to turn our eyes to the myriad lights that shine in refugees’ eyes, to the candles of their generosity of spirit in the face of so much rejection, and to the pools of light surrounding their families.

We might dream that the dusty and ill-fed children whose pictures we see will grow up after being given opportunities to follow their dreams. Those of us fortunate enough to be friends of people who have had to flee will be familiar with their stories of violence, hunger and fear. We will also have wondered at the extraordinary generosity of so many people whom they have met on their way, and how they have nurtured resilience and hope in the most difficult of times. We cannot but hope that their brothers and sisters fleeing from their homes in their own land will also find hospitality in our nation.

When we enter the life of refugees from within and see their extraordinary stories of suffering, resilience and love of family, and the importance of small gestures of kindness in their lives, we have a lens through which to judge the ways wealthy nations like our own reject them.

This refugee week, however, is not a time to curse the darkness. There is enough of that in our world. Refugee week is a time to turn our eyes to the myriad lights that shine in refugees’ eyes, to the candles of their generosity of spirit in the face of so much rejection, and to the pools of light surrounding their families. It also calls us from cursing the darkness to light our own candles as we reach out to people who seek our protection and as we plead their cause.

Banner image: A young Sudanese woman who fled the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, and was previously internally displaced in Sudan, moves past makeshift shelters, near the border between Sudan and Chad, while taking refuge in Borota, Chad, 13 May 2023. (Photo: OSV News/Zohra Bensemra, Reuters.)