Throwing Flowers

 

Exile for us, who have not a lasting city, and seek one that is to come [St Paul to Hebrews 13:14], is a journey begun by the very act of our births. Only the King of Heaven gave Himself up to it even at His Incarnation. Every person is born, is weaned, goes out from a home, and dies: a basic list to which a vast plethora of different variants are added in the experience of different souls.

I count myself fortunate that my list has imbued my soul with a sort of affection for exile – so much so that I have pasted in my glasses case the text: “How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land?” [Psalm 136, 4] Since my boyhood I loved to read about  exiles of various types; Solzhenitsyn’s purposely endless opening description of the variety of arrests; songs which spoke of the shackles as “bells” ringing out the progress of the advancing convoys; of Dostoevsky’s beautiful Gospel, which he received on the road to hard labour, and which he read almost constantly during that time; of St Rafał Kalinowski’s description of leaving Vilnius in convoy, when “the train departed, people moving along the heights that dominated the railway threw flowers on it as they do on graves of the dead at cemeteries”. Perhaps this seems strange reading for a boy, perhaps it was.  

On 10 July, 2024, when I, a lowly worker in our Christchurch Monastery, received a personal ukase (decree) of exile from Bishop Michael Gielen, it felt like nothing new. It echoed the above. It echoed the immigration apparatchiks (men of the system) I heard once at Heathrow as they went off duty: “Oh, what did you do with your Romanian?” “Ho, ho, I deported him.” It echoed the story related to us by a priest who as a boy was himself exiled to Siberia with his family, leaving his unburied sister in the living room laid out for her funeral. I feel as a number tattooed on an arm, a factor to be dealt with, a problem needing a final solution. It is a pity.

But the solidarity of the oppressed is a solidarity that - as love - is as strong as death.