Welcoming the stranger is a fundamental tenet, and sacred duty of many religions and cultures. To give hospitality with no wish or need for return beyond the joy of exchange with the other.
Welcoming the stranger life, the life of the stranger, is to trust (in God) and in the goodness of one’s fellow human beings, to be willing to accept their generosity with grace and respect.
A hundred years ago, the three women pictured above, my aunts, were forced to flee their home and lives in Moscow following the Russian revolution. This picture was taken in Harbin, China, in the early 1920s, where they spent a few years before they were able to take refuge in the United States, where they settled in California and began life anew.
They, like so many people now, were obliged to run. Now, a century later, a child of refugees, I have the privilege and freedom to start a new phase of my own life by undertaking a walking pilgrimage, from Canterbury in England to Jerusalem. The blog on this site will, I hope, become a record of these travels.
But I cannot undertake this pilgrimage without bearing in mind, and carrying with me, the awareness that while I am free, by virtue of my first-world passport, among other things, to cross innumerable borders visa-free or with minimal effort to obtain one, others around the world are running now for their lives, yet are stopped in their tracks, some by invisible yet potent barriers, others by actual walls, fences, police and violence, or even by slavery, or death.
So I hope to bear witness to the right of all human beings to migrate, to be welcomed wherever they go. I believe in open borders, for we are all sojourners on this earth.