Of raw prayer and defiant hope

Of raw prayer and defiant hope


Giles Fraser

Irrespective of the politics of immigration, the big issues of global fairness have come to our door and building higher fences is no answer

Members of the Eritrean community at the Sunday service in the migrant church in Calais. ‘As I sat in the corner, a succession of worshippers came in to pray, some wiping their hands over a poster of an angel and then wiping them over their heads.’ Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

No matter it was some Calais dive bar. Pool is pool. It was one game each – and I don’t like losing. Of course we have time for a decider I agreed, looking anxiously at my watch. I made a quick mental calculation. A 10-minute taxi ride would get me to the station 20 minutes before the train left. Yes, one more game and I could still be in England in just over an hour. We racked up the balls.
That’s how casually I think about a journey from Calais to London. I get to border control and waft a little red book that says something about “her Britannic majesty” requiring people like them to help people like me to “pass freely without let or hindrance”. This red book also affords me a level of protection and welfare unknown in many parts of the world. What did I do to deserve this book, I ask myself, as I casually return to London from Calais, in time for supper? It’s a trip some are now dying to make.

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The purpose of my Calais visit was instinctive. I wanted to say a prayer in the makeshift Ethiopian church – St Michael’s, I later discover – as a way of expressing Christian solidarity with my brothers and sisters in Christ, those who have been despised and rejected, now languishing in a refugee camp a few miles over the Channel. And what a great idea that Songs of Praise is coming from there on Sunday 16 August. Near the entrance of the camp, a drawing of cuddly Peruvian immigrant Paddington Bear declares “Migration is not a crime”. The church itself, only completed three weeks ago, was originally put up last November. Then the camp was moved and the church was relocated in April. Then this new one went up in flames when someone dropped a candle.
It was rebuilt again, on a larger scale, with whatever came to hand. It now rises up as a landmark within a community of tents, among piles of plastic waste and rubbish, next to a standpipe for fresh water. Forget those fancy churches that end up being museums for the 1% – this is a holy place. As I sat in the corner, a succession of worshippers – Ethiopian or Eritrean – came in to pray some wiping their hands over a poster of an angel and then wiping them over their heads. One man comes in on crutches, his leg broken. He fell trying to jump on the train. But the people who built this church are now in England, he tells me, with a triumphant twinkle of the eye. And I tell him that much of England’s finest church architecture was worked on by immigrants from northern France.

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Shoes left outside the entrance to the migrant church in Calais. Photograph: Rob Stothard/Getty

All day people come and go, leaving their shoes at the door. Though it turns out that this leaving the shoes thing is itself an act of faith because, within the camp, shoes are a valuable commodity. You can’t climb a barbed-wire fence with flip-flops. So shoes are often stolen – but not, I’m reassured, from outside the church or mosque.
So I leave mine on the mat and examine those that sit alongside, which remind me of those famous Van Gogh paintings of worn shoes that provoke the imagination to think of the toil that made them so. In my head, I make the journey over the desert, over the sea, up through Europe. With them, I pray for all those who have died making the journey. The Catholic church distributes about a hundred new pairs of shoes a week. But in this shantytown of 2,500 people, it’s nowhere near enough.

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I’m a Christian, so I have a special connection for fellow Christians. But the crisis here is not religious: it is humanitarian. And things are only going to get worse. It’s simple: we have so much and they have so little. I’m not getting into the politics of immigration here, but the big issues of global fairness have come to our door and building higher fences is no sort of answer.
Thousands of people enter this country every day without papers or a little red passport. They are called babies. And they are a drain on the economy for at least 20 years. From the viewpoint of eternity, by what right do they gain the advantages of the red book and others not? It’s nothing but luck. Or, in other words, there but for the grace of God go I.