The Practice of Sanctuary

"As a faith practice, sanctuary brings back into focus our community’s covenant to serve the Peaceable Kingdom." 

(Jim Corbett, The Sanctuary Church, Pendle Hill Pamphlet 270)

The practice of sanctuary has deep roots in Christian and other religious traditions. Sanctuary has often been associated with a particular sacred place, which offered a space of safety for people fleeing violent persecution. In modern times, the idea of sanctuary has broadened to include the many ways that local communities offer welcome and protection to people displaced by war, oppression, poverty and climate change.

British Quakers have been supporting people seeking sanctuary since the 17th Century, when they welcomed Hugeonot refugees escaping religious persecution in France. Before the second world war, Friends played a crucial role in the Kindertransport, which rescued thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Germany. Today, many British Quakers are welcoming people seeking sanctuary into their homes and their lives, and supporting them as befrienders, advocates, teachers and campaigners.

Quakers have a long-standing corporate testimony to opposing war. Those Friends who welcome people seeking sanctuary are offering their testimony against the modern state's 'war on refugees'. Over recent decades, despite numerous changes of government, the UK has increasingly resorted to dehumanising and violent methods for the enforcement of national borders. Arbitrary and indefinite detention, enforced destitution and forcible deportations have become instruments of policy, deliberately designed to create a ‘hostile environment’ to deter potential migrants. These are policies that make trauma and abuse inevitable, and that have led directly to the deaths of people seeking sanctuary in the UK by suicide and unlawful killing.

In the 18th Century, Quaker abolitionists such as John Woolman struggled against the "spirit of oppression" that made some human beings into slaves for the wealth and comfort of others. The same spirit is at work today in our treatment of people seeking sanctuary. They are our own society’s ‘non-persons’; victims of violence and abuse, detained without trial, or made destitute without the right to work. By steadily removing people seeking sanctuary from the basic services and legal protection of the rest of society, and making them into a target for violence and persecution, we have created a new underclass of systematically violated people. The immigration system is a visible sign of the disunity of the human family, a reflection and a consequence of our alienation from the Divine Guide. The practice of sanctuary confronts an immigration system that is designed to exclude and deter, that is grounded in the deliberate refusal of human community.

The Quaker experience is that friendship with excluded people is sacramental. It brings us into contact with the pain of our fellow human beings, but also with the hope and possibility of a world transformed by the presence and guidance of God. Offering sanctuary is an act of faith; a statement of hope in the possibilities of human solidarity. Through friendship with people seeking sanctuary, Quakers have discovered a view of society from the perspective of those who do not count, those who are rejected and dehumanised by official policy. These relationships of solidarity bring light to the hidden places where the violence of the immigration system is usually concealed, in detention centres, hostels and immigration courts. By illuminating the darkest corners of our society, and opening up new possibilities of unity and friendship, the practice of sanctuary expresses the transformative power of the divine Light, which "shows us our darkness and brings us to new life" (Advices and queries 1).

By defending the humanity and dignity of people seeking sanctuary, Friends keep alive the vision of a society that is open to friendship across barriers of race, culture, wealth and nationality. By refusing to accept the division of humanity by nationality and immigration status, the practice of sanctuary reveals and celebrates the divine ground and potential of human community. Like the practice of Quaker worship, the practice of sanctuary is "a celebration of the continual resurrection within us of the springs of hope and love; a sense that each of us is, if we will, a channel for a power that is both within us and beyond us." (Lorna M Marsden, Quaker faith & practice 20.16)

Relationships with people who are violated and excluded challenge us to discern how to respond with our own lives. By sharing their lives and stories with us, people seeking sanctuary remind us that they are not statistics or problems, but unique and precious human beings, each with their own hopes, anxieties and divine potential. By opening our eyes to this fundamental reality they ‘answer that of God’ in us. They awaken us to the Spirit of God at work in them and in us to overcome the violent divisions that we have imposed on the human family. Through them, the Inward Teacher is speaking to us, to challenge our own comfort with a social system that needs to brutalise and humiliate vulnerable people to protect our own standard of living.

Friendship with people seeking sanctuary is a reflection of our vocation to be a community that serves the Peaceable Kingdom, that keeps alive the vision of a world where human divisions are overcome in friendship and sharing. The practice of sanctuary reminds us that the heart of the Quaker way is a spirituality of hospitality. The Quaker practices of worship and discernment develop our capacity to welcome the life and activity of the divine Guide in our lives, to make a home for the "promptings of love and truth", even when they are unfamiliar or challenging. The practice of the Quaker way enables us to become people who are willing to open ourselves to the unsettling presence and unexpected gifts of the Other.