Article

Change

Freedom of Belief

23 June 2023

4 min read

Away from home, cut off from home

As Refugee Week concludes, Belle Tindall moves beyond the headlines and learns the story of Azer and the thousands of churches who are providing a sense of home for those who have fled theirs.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Welcome Network

No refugee alone – that’s the vision, that’s the hope, that’s the end game.

That is what is fuelling Welcome Churches, a charity that is encouraging, equipping and resourcing local churches to support refugees up and down the country. In the past twelve months alone, over one thousand churches have partnered with Welcome Churches to help ensure that their corner of the UK is a home fit for the people who are seeking sanctuary within it.

As a result, nearly eighteen thousand people have been welcomed into and supported by local churches in the past year.

One of those people is Azer.

Azer came to the UK in 2022, along with his wife, to study in Birmingham. The plan was to stay in the UK for two years, complete his studies, and then return home to Iran with the qualifications he needed to obtain a promotion in tow. However, just two months into his time at the University, Azer found that his bank account had been frozen, and he was unable to pay his fees, and therefore attend his classes. After assuming that this was down to some kind of technical fault, or perhaps a legal complication, Azer was horrified to learn that it was the Iranian authorities who had intentionally cut him off from his finances. Not only that, but they had also raided and seized his home in Iran, as well as raiding the home of his wife’s family.

He and his wife had been targeted.

Azer and his wife are Christians, which is a dangerous thing to be in Iran. Christian gatherings are prohibited, and any rumours of secret Christian activity is heavily monitored. In fact, practising Christianity can lead to imprisonment for ‘crimes against national security’. The pressure that Christians are under in Iran has led Open Doors to rank it as the eighth most dangerous country to be a Christian in the world.

Azer describes it this way,

Being a Christian in Iran and participating in the communities will have consequences, such as prosecution or execution. Converting from Islam to Christianity will have a price and your life is entitled to be taken by Islamic government agents. That's why house churches are held secretly. Absolutely, you fear. That's why everything is done in confidentiality regarding the worship services, and Bible readings.

As Helen, an Engagement Officer for Welcome Churches, says, ‘for some people it (Christianity) is literally life threatening, the persecuted church is a real thing’.

Despite the immense risks, Azer’s wife covertly practiced her Christianity while living in Iran, keeping Christian literature in her home. Something which, it seems, did not go unnoticed. As a result, returning to Iran is no longer a safe option for Azer, nor his wife. When asked how it felt to learn that his own government had targeted him and his family in this way, and to realise that his home could therefore no longer be his home, Azer described it this way,

We felt like all the organs of our body dismembered, and on the other hand, like something inside you has been lost which was your identity obtained during past years by your efforts. A mixture of helplessness, frustration, being thrown into the void, and implosion inside. Dealing with losing all your possessions and all your plans is very hard. Like somebody who survived after an earthquake and lost his family and home. On the other hand, feeling your life is in danger is harder to tolerate. We feel at any moment you can be killed by the agents. These threats last for a long time which is more difficult to cope with.

Because of the profound dangers that Azer and his wife face, they have applied for asylum here in the UK. Azer speaks powerfully of how being a refugee feels,

Even though being an asylum seeker carries legal status all over the world, you immediately have no social status and must navigate this extreme loss of identity in an unknown territory. Sometimes I cannot talk, think, or even concentrate and my wife and I often feel lonely and homesick for our parents and siblings.

The UN Refugee Agency reports that in November 2022 (the most recent statistics), there were 231,597 refugees, 127,421 pending asylum cases, and 5,483 stateless persons in the UK. Each with their own stories, their own fears, their own hopes. Each one having to juggle copious unknowns on a daily basis, navigating risks that many of us cannot fathom. The depth of emotion in Azer’s words as he speaks of his experience, it is hard to comprehend such trauma multiplied by such huge numbers. Yet, that is the reality that many local churches are coming face to face with, supported by Welcome Churches.

Believing that refugees are people to be supported, not problems to be solved, churches have been providing for their new neighbours in numerous ways: providing toys, clothes, food, warm spaces, games nights, social hubs and so much more. They have taken the biblical mandates to ‘welcome strangers’ and ‘love their neighbours’ incredibly literally, showing hospitality to people of all faiths, and none.

Of course, there is a political component to this that cannot be ignored, and one of Welcome Church’s core values is institutional justice for refugees and asylum seekers, believing that the Church/Christians should be at the forefront of ensuring that the Home Office is in a position to hear every case presented to it and respond with compassion. As Helen says,

It’s not for us to decide the validity of their claim. But neither is it for us to deny the validity of their humanity.

This Refugee Week is an opportunity to move beyond headlines, statistics and culture wars and ensure that people are seen, and stories are heard. It therefore seems only right that Azer gets the final word,

We ask Humbly that the UK (government) put themselves in our place, and then judge and treat us. In the meantime, we are thankful for all the love and compassion we have received from most of the British people. We pray to God to help and give us the power to reciprocate for this nation in the future.

Article

Ageing

Care

Change

31 January 2025

5 min read

Delicate, fragile, frail: how we cope when we age

The insights and analogies that help.

Helen Cowan

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

An old woman wearing a shawl looks pensive.

Valentin Balan on Unsplash.

“Who could dissect a portion of the human frame without marvelling at its delicacy, and trembling at its frailty?” mused preacher Charles Spurgeon in the nineteenth century. Songwriters, artists, authors and surgeons alike are fascinated by frailty. Within, beneath and beyond that fragile frame though, could there be a deeper reality, waiting to arise – and endure?

Fragile Lives is the ‘heart-stopping memoir’, operation by operation, of heart surgeon Professor Stephen Westaby. “The finest of margins,” he writes, “separates life from death, triumph from defeat, hope from despair – a few more dead muscle cells, a fraction more lactic acid in the blood, a little extra swelling of the brain. Grim Reaper perches on every surgeon’s shoulder.”

To what shall we compare this fragility of frame? - which means we can shatter sudden as glass, our “breath becoming air” in the blink of an eye? (Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon, called his memoir When Breath Becomes Air as he fought his own battle with cancer). A snowflake? A spider’s web? A butterfly wing? In Dutch still life paintings, the transience of life is variously depicted in dry, fallen withering petals, rotting fruit, and a glass vessel, like a vase. At some funeral services, it is said that we are made from dust, and to dust we shall return. Elsewhere in the Bible, we are likened to a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes, or to a flower that withers away, a fleeting shadow that does not endure. Our days are a mere handbreadth, our life but a breath, writes one Bible songwriter.

Medics talk more commonly of frailty than fragility – and it’s not just a byword for old age. According to the British Geriatrics Society, not all old people live with frailty; not all people living with frailty are old, though age is a recognised risk factor, with nearly 40 per cent of adults aged 85-90 being frail. Described as a vulnerability to external stressors which can result in sudden marked deterioration in function, frailty might feature as a combination of falls, immobility, delirium, incontinence, and increased side effects of medications, suggesting the body is struggling to cope. “A minor infection or minor surgery results in a striking and disproportionate change in health state – from independent to dependent, mobile to immobile, or lucid to delirious,” writes a team of doctors in The Lancet.

Frailty is a sign of advanced biological rather than chronological age. Often, it’s an unwelcome term, with consultant physician Patricia Cantley noting that, “from a patient or relative’s point of view, the word frailty seems to be at best somewhat vague and at worst, derogatory and demotivating”. She prefers to talk in terms of paper boats. Picturing young healthy patients as little tugboats of wood and steel, built to withstand storms, she likens the frail patient’s clinical situation to a paper boat, which can sail the sunny seas, but is soon buffeted and may be brought down by ‘medical winds’.

Encompassing also psychological and cognitive symptoms alongside the physical, frailty is not a fixed state, nor is decline in mind and body inevitable once frailty begins. Seen increasingly as a dynamic spectrum, reversal of frailty is sometimes possible; the paper boat being, to a degree, storm proofed and made to chart a different course. According to Dr John Travers, professor of public health at Trinity College, Dublin, twenty minutes of daily exercise can reverse physical frailty and build resilience in over 65-year-olds, while others suggest that movement based mind-body therapies such as tai-chi and yoga can strengthen both mind and body. Could there also be something of a spiritual strengthening in the frail patient? As the body decays and declines, could the soul, the spiritual self, enlarge, emerge and ultimately endure as life ebbs away? This was certainly the sentiment of Paul, one of the early church leaders, in the Bible, who, after much suffering, wrote: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was seen on our television screens to diminish physically in her last days, her purple hands, tiny frame and walking cane causing concern among viewers. She was, at her funeral, described simply as “our sister Elizabeth”, her small coffin dwarfed by pageantry and a crowd of 2,000 including presidents and kings. And yet, the former Moderator of the Church of Scotland has revealed that she talked much of her Christian faith in her dying days, while her funeral was an explosion of scripture, hymns and sermons that expressed the strength of her personal faith. “It was her way of eloquently, beautifully and powerfully speaking to me and 4.1 billion other people of her Christian faith,” writes Pastor Skip Heitzig. For me, the funeral brought to mind the tides (continuing with the theme of the sea). As the tide recedes, the waters move away from the shore, in what is known as an ebb current. As the tide rises, water moves toward the shore in a flood current. As our Queen’s life ebbed away physically, her spiritual self arose, roaring like a mighty flood. Ocean motion, in currents, waves and tides, is driven by the sun, moon and the planets. Our late Queen also looked upwards, to her God, for spiritual succour that would turn life’s ebb to a soul-flood.

Hymnwriter Timothy Dudley-Smith sought a similar exchange, from the physical to the spiritual, the mortal to the immortal, in yet more words about boats, in his hymn “My boat so small”, based on the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer.

“Adrift when strength and courage fail, O Spirit, breathe to fill my sail”

And, happily, he trusts a safe voyage, finishing with - “My voyage done, all trouble past, to haven bring my soul at last.”

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