WORDS Ann Rennie

We know through our Christmas story that within weeks of his birth, our saviour Jesus Christ was forced to undertake a perilous journey to escape persecution. There must be a special place in His heart for refugees today.

Around this time sixteen years ago I was expecting my first and only child. I had the luxury of five days in hospital, with nurses popping in to check my progress, tasty meals and a constant stream of visitors.

Her first home was a tiny white second-hand cradle with lots of bunny-rugs and fluff toys. Her tiny pink hands and feet were encased in hand-knitted mittens and booties and she was already a fashion victim with her wardrobe of Target 0000 doll size suits for every day of the week. She settled down into the sleep-feed-look-at-the-world routine and my life was to be rechoreographed in unexpected, and usually delightful, ways.

Just over two thousand years ago, a young peasant girl bore her first and only child. Her child, Jesus, was delivered on straw and the lowing of cattle heralded his birth. He had only a makeshift crib in his birthplace manger and modest swaddling clothes. He could not settle, as my daughter quickly did, into a space that was to become his small predictable familiar world. He did not have that chance because he was a refugee – a child under threat.

His small and holy family had to flee on hearing Herod’s decree that all male children under the age of two were to be slaughtered. Across rugged mountain terrain, on a donkey, over the desert, subject to the attack of brigands, worrying about food and water and weather, risking their lives, they travelled precariously to finally reach a safe haven in Egypt.

Small families, unaccompanied children, and many young males face more than ‘no room at the inn’ when they arrive on Christmas Island. They arrive, often after a dangerous journey over the sea, having faced pirates or storms or lack of fresh water, or the promises of people smugglers.

Christmas Island. And we can so easily imagine a landscape that suits the name, a palm fringed paradise of temperate clime in the Indian Ocean. The tourist picture is one of bushwalking and deserted beaches and a famed red crab migration. The detention centre picture is not so pretty.

Few in this facility will be enjoying Christmas on the island over the festive season, away as they are from family and friends and the rituals and practices and the small familiarities that provided certainties in their lives. They may be given a better meal on the day, but for them this will mean little, as they gaze at photos of loved ones or try to phone home for a brief word or slowly go crazy with not knowing what will happen next in this strange never-never limbo land.

As we cherish again the stories of the holy family; the man, the woman, and the God-child who would save the world, perhaps this Christmas we can re imagine that fateful first journey and align it more readily and sympathetically with the journeys of those who look for welcome on our shores.

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