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Pilgrim, priest and ponderer. European living in North East England. Retired parish priest, theological educator, cathedral precentor and dean.

Saturday 29 December 2018

Quirinius Lives: the Home Office Says “Register!”

Someone in high places wasn't paying attention when their Home Office video was launched on the Third Day of Christmas. It was early in the morning of the 27 December, the first tweet out of the Home Office after wishing everyone a happy Christmas. If you haven't heard, this is the video that tells citizens from the 27 overseas EU countries who want to go on living in the UK after Brexit how to set about applying. "EU citizens and their families will need to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to continue living in the UK after 31 December 2020" it says. It takes 55 seconds to watch.

It's deeply ironic that this video should have been released during the twelve days of Christmas. Only a few days earlier, more than half the nation must have heard St Luke's account of the birth of Jesus read at thousands of nativity plays, crib blessings, Christingles and carol services. In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. In the ancient world you had to fit in with the requirements of a process-driven bureaucracy. Plus ca change. So Joseph and Mary have to make the arduous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, she nine months pregnant. They get there only to find there is no room at the inn. You know how the story continues.

So around 3.2 million people will need to register before 2021. That's a lot more form-filling than even dreary Quirinius could have dreamed of. Who doesn't love a good registration? What better excuse for a public holiday? Better still if you can anticipate government coffers swelling with unbudgeted income from it, for many of our EU27 friends will have to pay for the privilege of registering. I don't know if this was entirely clear to them before.

Predictably the video has been greeted with responses ranging from eye-rolling boredom (what did you expect from the Home Office?) through mockery and sarcasm to outright fury. Most striking has been the outrage of many people from EU27 countries who have lived in Britain for decades and thought this was their home. The Guardian quotes one: "You absolute s***! I've lived here 35 years, got a stamp in my passport for indefinite leave to remain in 1985 and now you want me to apply to stay in my own home." This from a Danish citizen who lives in the UK. And this which came up on my own Twitter feed: "Wow. This is making me feel so welcome, after 28 years of life here, making friends, paying taxes, bringing up two wonderful British citizens. Thank you so much for this slap in the face, UK Home Office. Absolutely sickening".

But I've also been struck by the responses of British citizens. "Seeing the impact of this policy on people I know and work with is a wake up call. I feel angry and ashamed" writes one. "I too am ashamed. I feel that I don’t belong here. We are not a civilised nation and the government does not represent anything I believe in" writes another. And this: "Making those who share a citizenship with us register as if they were aliens is quite shocking. Now we describe a few hundred refugees arriving at Dover as a national crisis and debate whether or not we should be rescuing them".

That last remark gets to the heart of the matter. The point about registration, which will not have been lost on Mary and Joseph, is that you are made to feel that your homeland isn't your own any more. It's been taken over by others, occupied by people who think they can control you by insisting that you comply with their requirements. My Jewish mother and her family knew all about this in Germany in the 1930s under the Nazis, and the creeping subjugation of the Jewish community by what might have seemed at first to be harmless bureaucratic processes of "registration". In Roman-occupied Judea, registration was a device to keep a potentially restless population in its place. (Never mind that there's some historical difficulty about Luke's account of this event - what we do know about Quirinius is that he was appointed as Imperial legate early in the first century precisely to oversee an exercise of this kind, even though the dates don't fit Luke's chronology. The nativity story still makes a powerful point about the two kinds of authority that are always at work in the world and confronting each other - human and divine, or we might say, the politics of God and the politics of human beings. Or maybe justification by faith or registration.)

I tweeted about this yesterday: "Like the registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. It reminded the Holy Family that they lived in an occupied land. Precisely how Brexit Britain now is for all true Europeans, whether from the UK or an EU27country". That didn't please one of my followers who wanted to know in what sense the UK today is like first century Roman-occupied Judea. Who is doing the occupying he asked? "Our worst selves" I replied. We are doing this to ourselves and one another. Somewhere, out of the shadow side of our nation has come this self-destructive instinct to "take back control" in ways that distance us, even cut us off from the neighbour we are commanded to love. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, we have come to a time in our history when demons of suspicion, resentment and hostility are being unleashed in our “othering” of those who only wish us well. In terms of our collective national psyche, a spirit is abroad that threatens a healthy sense of our identity, who we are and who we aspire to be as good human beings. This is the occupying power. And it seems to have us in its thrall.

This may seem strong language. Perhaps I'm more coloured than I should be by my family's experience of the 1930s. But how could I not be? But for Britain's welcome to Jewish refugees at that time, my mother would not have survived the Holocaust and I wouldn't be here now. I can feel viscerally the effect of becoming like an exile in my own country, ill at ease, sorry, ashamed. This is not the kind, just, generous, fair-minded nation I thought I lived in. At least, not in this respect. I think many of the Windrush generation will say the same. It's not easy to sing the Lord's song in this strange land.

It's still Christmas. We are still celebrating the wonderful events that followed Quirinius' (or whoever's) registration. Incarnation, God's coming among us as a vulnerable holy human Child is wisdom's answer to the follies of mortals. The Infant of Bethlehem brings hope to our world and promises to deliver us from this occupation we are experiencing by our worst selves. I was heartened by a positive reply to my despondent Quirinius tweet. "I too sometimes feel that it isn’t my country any longer. Then I speak to one or more of the many wonderful people I know, and I am reminded that recovery is both possible and necessary."

We look into one another's faces and glimpse reflected there what we see when we look into the face of God’s Incarnate Son. What we see is nothing less than grace and truth. So my prayer is that we shall all be guided by divine grace and truth into better days in the new year that is dawning. And that grace and truth may free us from all that demeans human life by teaching us to look on our neighbours not as strangers but as friends whom we love with something like the love with which God loves each of us.

2 comments:

  1. Yes I think it's significant, highly significant and often sugarcoated, that the Christmas story isn't happy clappy. A young woman getting pregnant and her husband almost divorcing her quietly. They need to travel while she's highly pregnant, and they are unable to get into an inn. Inns were apparently dirty, smelly, unhygienic establishments. Richer people travelled in caravans with private tents (maybe Paul made those? I seem to recall some disagreement on how the Greek in Acts should be translated).
    Mary and Joseph were too poor to afford the proper offering for the birth of Jesus, and so offered the poor person's offering of two doves. Then they had to flee to Egypt. I know I'm mixing up Luke and Matthew, but the tradition has grown like that. There's all these vivid details of poverty, a sense of dis-belonging, and danger (first to Mary for being cast away, then from Herod etc).
    As we're so habituated to the sugary version of Christmas, here's a nice artistic rendition by a comic artist in a contemporary setting (look for the clever Bible references: https://curiator.com/art/everett-patterson/jose-y-maria)
    Anyway, Christmas is cheery but it's also a pretty grim story as God became incarnate under difficult circumstances, among the least of us. I take comfort in that.

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  2. I totally agree with you. We have EU Citizens in our parish, married to British people, and they could if they wish to be naturalized, but having had the right to live here for a long time, also want to preserve their cultural heritage and to be free to travel in Europe in the future, without the need to pay a fee for a visa.

    Have we learned nothing from the Windrush scandal. People who have lived here for over 50 years, being deprived of their rights because something called the "Hostile Environment" introduced by Tory led governments and still in place, as many migrants find to their cost.

    We went to the Commonwealth and Europe to recruit for our Armed Forces, yet many who have served the Queen in many wars, still have to struggle with the immigration system if they want to settle in the UK after completing their service, many after 22 years of service in active service during that time.

    This country used to be the haven for those who were refugees, now it is a laughing stock of the world for its treatment of people fleeing to a place of safety, that once welcomed them with open arms.

    There should be an outcry of revulsion by the whole nation against this policy, to turn it around, but sadly many people, bemused and blinded by the #Leave rhetoric are nodding wisely in agreement with the policy.

    Shame on the Government and shame on the Home Secretary, son of migrants himself, to even consider such a policy.

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