Over many years I have celebrated Christmas and Easter in places where people are locked up — in refugee camps, prisons and detention centres. To be in these places at such times is hard. It is also a privilege.
Easter and Christmas are hard times precisely because in my own religious tradition and more diffusely in Western cultures, these are times of celebration. For Christians, Christmas is about a birth that makes all the difference to life. Easter is about a rising from the dead that makes all the difference to death. Both are celebrations of exuberant, sprawling, unexpected life, the stuff of families at high tide.
For people who are locked up by another group of people Christmas and Easter are not times of celebration. Dressed turkey simply reminds you that you are the turkey. They are times of grief for Christmases past, for Easters never enjoyed, for forced absence from the people who nurture life, for lives that seem wasted, for a more innocent time when it seemed that life itself was a blessing.
These are places where grief, anger and separation breed depression; where to be told stories of freedom and compassion only makes your present life the more intolerable. It is hard to be with people in times of such compounded misery.
But places of imprisonment are also privileged places to be in at Easter and Christmas. There I am put in touch with the reality that prisoners and detainees are not problems, monsters or examples of depression and oppression, but my fellow human beings who are doing it hard.
My presence, no matter how ineffective it is in changing people's circumstances, may not be totally ineffectual. It may encourage people to believe that they and their simple humanity matter.
I am also constantly surprised and encouraged by the resilience of people whose life journey has been full of tragedy and rejection, and by the awkward kindnesses of those who are responsible for keeping them locked up. When I meet Ahmed and Steve rather than the stereotypes of asylum seeker and officer, I come away with a deeper respect for human possibility.
For a Christian minister, too, these are privileged places because here the stories of Christmas and