Rehumanising

I’ve had a long standing relationship with Oxfam shops. Long before the word recycle began to exert some leverage on our throwaway habits, Oxfam was working hard at being honest broker, the middle man (sic) in transactions where they got stuff for nothing and sold it on for bargain prices. Books by the dozen, the occasional shirt (one suitably sombre tie needed while on holiday to attend a family funeral), a superb ratchet nut cracker more like a shifting spanner and a real mauler with almond shells, along with fair trade honey and coffee.

Bought another book the other day in the more upmarket branch in Hillhead, Byres Road! Poems for Refugees, originally published to raise money for the children of Afghanistan. I’ve enlarged the cover so you can see the sad beauty of this vulnerable, precious little human being. Her home – who knows? Her parents – maybe there, maybe dead. Her future – again, who knows. I took the book because of the picture – and also because of the poems – and mostly because something deep in my heart and spirit is simply not prepared to accept that this is the way it has to be for this child.

I used a rare word yesterday – I’d like to see it enter the common stock of everyday words. I haven’t looked it up in a dictionary, I’ve decided to define i for myself – to take it to mean what I think it means and should mean in the vocabulary of the 21st C!

Rehumanise (def): to restore human dignity to the dehumanised; to reinclude (another new word?) a person in the human community; to remove causes of dehumanisation.

Recently I’ve started to notice social situations, unhealthy relationships, institutional practices, political decisions, management styles, military protocols and commercial behaviour which undermine, deny, diminish, ignore, people’s humanity. This poetry book is essentially a protest on behalf of rehumanising practices. Its sections include

On Exile and the Refugee

On War

On Diversity

On Love and Loss

Consider for a second or two who you are, what you are – what matters to you –what you want from life –those you love and whose disappearance would deprive your life of an essential joy –

Think humanely, imagine and celebrate what it means for you to be a woman, a man, a child – and then look again at the book cover, at the bewildered uncertainty of this child, this small refugee human being, caught up in war, suffering God alone knows what love, and loss, and loss of love. Different from us but deeply, essentially, humanly, the same. And remember the rehumanising words of Jesus,’Let the children come to me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’. So how come countries which claim any moral continuity with Jesus can impose political and economic sanctions which inevitably lead to large scale suffering for children?

Aye – I know there are political realities, that the world is complex, and a dangerous world becomes positively perilous when spiritual and theological reasons are given as to why such policies are wrong. But I can’t get the thought out of my head, that Jesus is on the side of this child, these children.  And that the Word who became flesh, cherishes and comforts the vulnerable beauty that is a human being, made in the image of God.