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Good morning. Of the very many crosses in the British Museum, one particular cross has been chosen to tour some English galleries over the summer, stopping of at Manchester, Hastings, Derby, Ipswich, Bristol and Rochester. It is not, as you might expect, a priceless jewel encrusted wonder of medieval workmanship – of which the Museum has very many - but a simple wooden cross, with nothing more than flaking paint for decoration, acquired only 5 years ago just after it was made. It is the work of Francesco Tuccio, a resident of Lampedusa – where, just off the coast in October of 2013, 311 Eritrean and Somali refugees were drowned, en route from Libya to Europe, after their boat caught fire, capsized and sank. Mr Tuccio, the island’s carpenter, fashioned this and other crosses from the wreckage of the stricken vessel. The connection between boats and crosses is deep in Christian symbolism, and on display in nearly any church you enter. The cross is normally prominent and the centre of attention – while the main body of the church is called the nave, from the Latin for ship. Theologians may have spilt much ink in explaining exactly how this may be so, but the thought is plain enough – by virtue of his sacrifice on the cross, Christ provides an ark of salvation against the storms and tempest of the troubled sea of the world. The Lampedusa cross inverts this symbolism – rather than the cross becoming a boat, the pieces of the ill-fated boat which went down in the Mediterranean, have become a cross. The boat which should have provided safe passage to a safe haven, instead led to pain, suffering, and death. Of course those splendid jewel encrusted crosses of the middle ages would themselves have made tours back in the day, especially if they contained relics of one kind or another. When a community felt in especial need of divine assistance – at times of plague, or famine, or even at such important but risky moments as the planting of crops – these objects were taken out and about in the hope that they would ensure favourable results. We may or may not expect miracles from relics these days, but it is surely permissible to hope – at a time when the Mediterranean remains perhaps the most dangerous border in the world - that the progress of this modern day relic may cause all those to see it to ask the question which the tragedy in the Mediterranean poses: how can we ensure that the boats carrying those who desperately seek a better future don’t end up becoming yet more crosses.