To the Edge and Beyond

Alex Holmes writes about life and loss in the borderlands.

Calais Draughts, Alex Holmes

Watergang du Nord, Calais. The narrow stream that flows along the northern edge of the Courgain Est playing fields. Willow scrub on its southerly bank once sheltered many dozens of Eritreans’ tents. All that remains now is a broad carpet of wood shavings. Another campsite obliterated. The new site is an old site from which the Eritrean community was last evicted in 2022. Back then, it had become a swampland of puddles and mud.

September. The weeks of summer dry have ended; torrential cloudbursts now herald the change of season.  After a night of heavy rain, the fence is a festoon of wet clothes and bedding. Five sodden blankets topped by a sheet of plastic will serve as a soft underlay for Zehra’s tent. The sun emerges and there’s now a holiday feel. The grass, newly mown, is a sward of alternating dark and light green stripes. A pot of food bubbles on a fire. There’s music, Massawa delicately plucking the strings of a krar, a traditional Eritrean instrument.  Finishing his tune, he passes the krar to Fikru who plucks and sings. Elsewhere, a game of dominoes is underway.  Dawit is deep into a book. You want morning coffee? Hayat proffers a small paper cup emblazoned with the words ‘Café Royal, Switzerland’. The coffee is intensely sweet.

How is UK? Fireside, it’s the question asked again and again. This time it’s Ariam who’s asking. And then, Ariam, you tell your story. How you escaped from Eritrea to Israel only to be deported after five years to Rwanda and then pushed by the Rwandan authorities into Uganda. How you journeyed to Egypt, married and became the father of three children. Your dream is to reach the UK and have your family join you. But today is the very day that the UK government has added to its ‘one-in-one-out’ flagship deterrence deal with France by putting a halt to refugee family reunion.

A sudden electrical charge pulses through the campsite; everyone is immediately on edge. Robel and Hamid stride towards the gate at the field entrance to check who might be approaching. After a recent night attack, two Eritreans keep guard throughout the hours of dark. Yusef describes how his fingers were slashed and needed stitches. Now, Yusef, you sit on the edge of your seat clutching your bandaged hand, your eyes following Robel and Hamid. This time the approaching group are new arrivals, an Eritrean family with two children. The relief is palpable; the electrical charge dissipates.

But the police clearance that occurs every second day is expected and the camp must be dismantled. Anything left will be taken away. Within minutes it becomes a ghost site, emptied of people and possessions. There remains just a residue of occupation: Yohannes’ wheelchair, a single trainer, a pair of trousers on the perimeter fence sporting the words ‘The Past’. And close to the edge of the smouldering fire, the abandoned krar.  It will be dusk before anyone will dare return.

Wissant, a village at the Channel’s edge, down the coast from Calais. Another story told. Your story, Abbas. “Fishermen rescued you on your way from Libya to Italy, where you were the only survivor of a shipwreck involving 58 people. In 2012, you were one of the first to testify that the Mediterranean border is killing people, but the UNHCR blocked the broadcasting of your testimony. You spoke of your route, Sudan, Lalibela and the restaurants in Addis Ababa. About the war when you were a child and how you left Assab by stepping over dead bodies. Eventually you were resettled in France where the psychiatrists wanted to pump you full of drugs. Rightly, you didn’t want to take them. What’s the point of taking medication in order to conform to a society that excludes us, destroys us, imprisons us in individualism? You have shown us once again, and once too often, how the border kills and how important it is to fight for freedom of movement.” Words of tribute spoken at your graveside, Abbas. A single candle flickers in a glass jar. Hands are placed on your coffin. Gently you are lowered over the edge and into the dark earth.

God is a Starving Man

Community member Thomas writes on the Gospel the Far Right forget.

Print taken from the CW Newsletter (December 1947)

In September, tens of thousands of people descended on London to take part in what was probably the largest

far-right rally in British history. As one would expect from such a large group, their messaging was not entirely coherent, but the general sentiment was that immigrants, and particularly refugees, are a threat to Britain and should be treated with as much cruelty and violence as necessary to deter them. Leaving aside false claims about migrants being more likely to commit crimes, and particularly sexual violence – a claim which has been made by virtually every wave of bigotry in the modern era – a commonly cited justification for hostility towards migrants is the idea that, through immigration, Britain is losing its “identity”, an identity which the far-right is increasingly inclined to identify as specifically Christian. A significant minority at the march were carrying crosses, and a handful of the speakers were clergy from various denominations, some of whom led the crowd in prayer. Tommy Robinson himself claims to have become a Christian during his most recent imprisonment for contempt of court. He has spoken very little about it, and it certainly seems to have had no effect on his politics. But even the more outspokenly Christian figures of the far-right tend in practice to achieve very little integration of the Gospel with their politics. We do not find in figures like Calvin Robinson any particularly developed theology of the nation-state, or any explanation for the apparent contradiction between their hostility to impoverished migrants and the Gospel.   They generally present themselves as defenders of Christianity, but have little to say about the religion itself, or the so-called “Christian nation”, which they are supposedly defending.

Still, this development requires a serious response. Sections of the far-right have made a claim about what Christianity is; we have to be able to respond with confidence, knowing that the authority of Scripture and

the tradition of the Church is behind us. Thankfully, there has been a response from the leadership of the Church; the presidents of Churches Together in England released a statement condemning the appropriation of Christian imagery at the march to ends contrary to the Gospel, which is worth reading. But also, by a happy coincidence, a couple of months after the rally, Pope Leo published the first magisterial document of his papacy, Dilexi Te, which he completed from a draft written by Pope Francis before his death. The focus of the document is the poor of the world, and their centrality to Christianity and the Church. Jesus was a poor man who devoted himself to serving and preaching to poor people; the first thing he says in public about his own ministry is that he has been anointed “to bring good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). This was not merely a “poverty in spirit” – Jesus was itinerant, and had nowhere to lay his head; his poverty must have come with discomfort and suffering, and he was born and died in a position of social exclusion. As Pope Leo puts it, “he experienced the same exclusion that is the lot of the poor, the outcast of society [...] not only as a poor Messiah, but also as the Messiah of and for the poor.” (DT 19). Thus:

Love for the Lord is one with love for the poor. The same Jesus who tells us, “The poor you will always have with you”, also promises the disciples: “I am with you always”. We likewise think of his saying: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me”. This is not a matter of mere human kindness but a revelation: contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history. In the poor, he continues to speak to us. (DT, 5)

To come closer to Jesus, we must be close to poverty, through direct experience or solidarity:

works of mercy are recommended as a sign of the authenticity of worship, which, while giving praise to God, has the task of opening us to the transformation that the Spirit can bring about in us, so that we may all become an image of Christ and his mercy towards the weakest. (DT, 27)

There is no arbitrary distinction between a set of spiritual practices on the one hand, and on the other hand encouragement to do good works; Christianity is a social religion, something we do together. Jesus’ position in society, and the way he related to others, is the key to understanding how we are supposed to relate to each other.

Jesus was also a refugee. The Holy Family was forced to flee political persecution under Herod and seek refuge in Egypt, away from Herod’s political authority, when he was a baby. Migrants without papers are often, of course, the poorest in our own society, because they are not entitled even to the inadequate welfare which is afforded to citizens. Jesus knew not only material poverty, but also the social exclusion which is often migrants’ experience. Pope Leo notes that “The experience of migration accompanies the history of the People of God,” in the lives both of Jesus and of exiled Israel, and:

For this reason, the Church has always recognized in migrants a living presence of the Lord who, on the day of judgment, will say to those on his right: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” (DT, 73)

We ignore this at our peril. A genuinely Christian country would regard migrants as part of the Body of Christ and act accordingly. We would have to recognise a vision of the common good which genuinely included all of the people whom God has given us to love as our neighbours, which is everybody. Those who migrate, especially those who do so illegally, are doing us a valuable service. They are insisting on their own dignity, and their concomitant right to a decent life, against everything the modern nation state can throw at them. We should follow them in insisting on human dignity ourselves. Let us thank God that he has chosen to reveal himself in the poor, so that in enacting justice we come closer to him. Let us thank God that he reaches out to us with millions of hands every day. Let us thank God that we have a Church which still recognises these things in a time when most of our institutions have failed to. I will end with some words from the end of Dilexi Te:

For Christians, the poor are not a sociological category, but the very “flesh” of Christ. It is not enough to profess the doctrine of God’s Incarnation in general terms. To enter truly into this great mystery, we need to understand clearly that the Lord took on a flesh that hungers and thirsts, and experiences infirmity and imprisonment. A poor Church for the poor begins by reaching out to the flesh of Christ. If we reach out to the flesh of Christ, we begin to understand something, to understand what this poverty, the Lord’s poverty, actually is; and this is far from easy. (DT, 110).

To shout or not to shout?

Community member Naomi writes on noisy protest and what could be gained from a more disruptive Christian witness.

DSEI Arms Fair Protest (9th September 2025), Credit: MaktoobMedia

If we have ever met at a protest, you will know that I love making a bit of a ruckus. If someone jumps on the megaphone or starts singing a Billy Bragg song, I will be there singing it at the top of my lungs. While protest can take many forms, an essential part of protest for me is to be disruptive, to be in a physical space and claim ownership of it. But this is not without its limitations; we (and I include myself in this) can be guilty of making noise for noise’s sake. Speaking from personal experience, sometimes the most disruptive protest can be entirely silent.

I have been thinking a lot about how we occupy this physical space, particularly as Christians. In particular, what is the role of Christians in those spaces? Are we there to bring peace, to simply be there as a sign of solidarity with the cause, making the other protesters know that we are “not like other Christians”? Is it enough for us to just be there, or do we also need to be willing to be disruptive? 

Since joining the Catholic Worker, there have been three protests that have made me ponder the efficacy of noisy protest. The first was at the DSEI Arms Fair in September, a staple in the life of the London Catholic Worker. Every two years at the opening of one of the largest arms fairs in the world, people of all faiths and none descend on the Excel Centre as a visible witness to the horrors of the arms trade. We began our time there with a Quaker meeting for worship (perhaps the most obvious example of silent witness). I have often found meetings for worship moving, particularly when they are held in public. There was a moment when we became surrounded by police officers threatening to move us on. As an act of non-violent witness, a friend stood up and welcomed the police officers to the meeting. You could argue that this wasn’t particularly effective – we weren’t part of the group of protesters who were blocking the entrance to the arms fair, for example – but the stillness in that space felt similar to the moment of stillness Elijah experienced on Mount Horeb. In that moment, I experienced God not in the violence of the arms fair, but in a “moment of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:12). 

Buoyed up by this moment of stillness, I felt empowered to join a group of protesters outside the exit of the Excel Centre for a very different type of disruption. There we were as the attendees were leaving the fair, shouting “shame! shame on you!” At the time, I felt some discomfort doing this. I could see that some of the other people of faith remained silent, not engaging with the chanting. And who was I, a fellow sinner, to bring shame on people just doing their jobs? But in doing this, we engaged far more with the attendees than with the meeting for worship. The disgruntled attendees stopped and asked why we were shaming them, pushing back against us. Would we have had the same response if we had stood there in silence? After all, didn’t Jesus speak uncomfortable truths to the authorities of his time (Matthew 23)? Didn’t he also make a ruckus in the Temple (John 2:3–16) and, like the persistent widow in Luke 18, teach us to make our presence felt? 

Another example comes, once again, from the Quakers, during the October Defend our Juries action in Trafalgar Square. The Quakers decided to hold meetings for worship every hour on the hour for the duration of the demonstration. This was in response to a call for a silent demonstration, certain that the disruptive nature came from the words on the placards the sitters were holding. About halfway through the day, a group of socialist organisers set up camp next to us and got thoroughly disgruntled with what we were doing. One of them got on a megaphone, shouting at us: “why are you silent? This is not the time for silence! Now is the time for action! Your silence makes you complicit!” It seems that silent contemplation can really annoy some comrades...

A few weeks after this, I attended an anti-fascist demo in Whitechapel. The local community had successfully stopped UKIP from marching through a predominantly South Asian area of London. Despite the fact UKIP had moved their march to Hyde Park, the anti-fascist organisers decided to stay in Whitechapel and keep a presence there. There were so many anti-fascist demonstrators that we filled Whitechapel High Street, occupying the road for a few hours at least. Despite the police trying to contain it, they couldn’t stop us shouting, marching, dancing and, yes, even singing Billy Bragg songs. Walking away from the demo I experienced an unexpected moment of stillness; because the High Street had been blocked, all I could hear on my walk back to the tube was the sound of birdsong and the market-sellers. I found myself thinking about Psalm 62:

“Wait on God alone in stillness, O my soul; for in him is my hope.” 

(v. 7)

In that moment, all I wanted to do was give thanks for the beauty of this moment but also the holy actions of the demonstrators that made this peace possible. 

I don’t write this to have a definitive answer on whether we should be noisy at protests or not; perhaps it depends on what the situation demands. Even so, I offer this as a provocation to those of us who might want to avoid the discomfort of disruptive protest. So often I have found us Christians are reticent to be disruptive, resorting to candlelit vigils and silent prayer. I often wonder what the church would look like if we preached a gospel of noisy disruption. Imagine if our preachers told us to pick up a placard, grab your megaphone and take to the streets, the place where Christ is so often found. The Book of Proverbs reminds us to “speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute” (Proverbs 31:8). Perhaps a bunch of noisy Christians would do the world a whole lot of good.