Scott McLeod is Associate Priest at St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catherine’s, Ontario and coordinator of the refugee sponsorship program for the Diocese of Niagara in the Anglican Church of Canada. He looks at that terrible picture and weeps.
On the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe, he writes:
I will admit it. I am, literally, in tears as I write this.
The picture. Yes—that picture that started circulating yesterday of the 3 year old boy washed up on the beach in Turkey.
He and his family were trying to come here—to Canada. The heart strings are pulled.
My son is 3. Trying to think through everything that led to that picture is too much. The conflict in Syria. The danger and difficulty of travel, and not being able to find a safe place. The difficult choices that get made by people under tremendous pressure, faced with bad choices and even worse alternatives—and I don’t mean the refugees fleeing, I mean the civil servants and state agents enforcing policies and laws that were never designed to even start dealing with the kinds of need we are now seeing in the world. Those policies and laws that needlessly put the lives of innocents in danger, and make it safer to board an un-sea-worthy vessel in hopes of reaching a distant safe shore, rather than face a horrible and painful death. Immigration laws and systems, whether in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, North or South America, were not designed for dealing with the kind of human migration that is happening, mostly due to armed conflict around the world….
…My heart bleeds, my eyes stream with tears when I think about it too long, and when I am sitting there feeling totally helpless my internal monologue consists of a sustained scream. What is wrong with the world? What is wrong with us? What, in the name of God, is going on?
Read the rest here.