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Good morning.

‘Home has never been more important!’ proclaimed some bumph which landed on my doormat the other morning. An email I opened shortly afterwards told me ‘It’s time to nest’. Retailers, it seems, have latched on to the idea that as the continuing pandemic renders the public world a little bit risky, making home a safe – and comfortable – space, is a winning appeal.

The advertisers’ injunctions render all the more striking yesterday’s report - from the Swiss based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre - that nearly 15 million people have been uprooted from their homes in the first six months of the year. Just about 10 million people have been internally displaced by floods, bushfires and other natural disasters. And another nearly 5 million have fled conflict and violence.

For most of us, being driven from our homes and localities is almost unimaginable – but early Christians did indeed try to imagine Mary, Joseph and Jesus on their flight to Egypt, as it was termed. Knowing that the baby’s life is threatened by Herod, Joseph arose and ‘took the child and his mother and departed by night’ – that’s all the Bible tells us. But pious legend did not tolerate this informational gap – stories tell of palm trees bending down to offer dates to the weary travellers; the party handily picks up a nurse to help with the needy infant; and some pictures have beautiful angels providing music to soothe tired bodies. All well and good, but the trip can begin to appear more like a jolly jaunt in the country than the trail of tears any such getaway must surely be.

But if such conceptions of the flight into Egypt seem in danger of becoming flights of fancy, I think there is another way to look at them. The early Christians who told these tales were probably far more capable than I am of imagining the horrors of fleeing the security of home and family, so they were likely not making a naïve mistake in picturing it as they did. Instead, I think the stories of these fugitives meeting with care and kindness, and with every provision for their needs, are dreams of a world where the displaced stranger is welcomed as a new neighbour, not shunned as an outsider in the wrong place. The stories are not a mistake; they are a challenge.

And the challenge in the time of the Covid crisis is this. Can a new sense of the importance of home create not just a desire for a brand new sofa, but prompt a greater empathy and active concern for the plight of those driven from their homes?

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