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  • Added April 18th, 2016
  • Filed under 'All Sorts'
  • Viewed 1883 times

The story of the Lampedusa Crosses

By Colin Gibson in All Sorts

our response to refugees and the symbolism of the cross

BY THE TIME you read this article, Mornington
Methodist Church will have hosted one of the meetings being held around Dunedin, as the city prepares to receive a small group of Syrian refugees. Our quota of a few families is part of this country's timid response to the plight of millions of displaced people around the world as civil war and social turmoil, poverty of a kind we can
hardly imagine, unemployment and climate change take their toll.
Our leaders tell us we cannot afford to take anymore and that this country's relative prosperity would take a massive hit if we opened our gates an inch or so wider. And Mr English worries that his government's 'balanced' budget, with its electorally profitable hope of a magic surplus, might be upset by the arrival of numbers of people without money (that most important of all worldly goods), in poor health (no more problems for our underfunded health services, please) and without desirable technical skills.
Who is my neighbour? Well, not certainly impoverished refugees and asylum seekers, battered by the bandits of this world, and left to groan in a ditch by the side of the road. The ugly truth of these beautiful islands is that our elected representatives have no intention of allowing our tourist- pleasing world to be turned into a haven for the wretched mass of humanity flowing from one country to another, searching to escape from the nightmare that is now their home.
On the other side of the world, where the blue waters of the Mediterranean lap the golden shores of the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, the local population of 6000 people, who get most of their income from European sun-seeking tourists, have a problem like ours. In March 2011 their population doubled, as thousands of Libyan, Syrian, Somali and Ethiopian asylum seekers and 'economic' refugees reached their shores, desperate to escape persecution, poverty, or to get a chance at a better life, and have continued to arrive in huge numbers. Lampedusa has become a symbol of Europe's migrant crisis, and its reluctant response to that crisis.
An Amnesty team found that the Italian authorities were very slow to help the refugees stranded on the island and that the islanders were worried that the tens of thousands of tourists who arrive every year would not return for the summer season. 'Keeping the island attractive to tourists is on everyone ́s mind, it seems. When we visited a boat cemetery, where old boats of migrants can be found, the impression we got from the Italian military guard there was that migrants were a bad thing, and that the boats do not represent what Lampedusa is really about-an island for tourists.'
Enter Francesco Tuccio, a carpenter living on Lampedusa. One Sunday in 2011, at the height of the Arab spring, this humble carpenter made a decision to stop making furniture. He was at Mass in his local church. Among the congregation were bedraggled groups of newly arrived Eritrean migrants, weeping for loved ones who had drowned during the Mediterranean crossing. After the service he went to the beach and began collecting the blistered, brightly coloured driftwood from the wreckage of migrant boats that had washed up on Lampedusa's shores. He decided to make crosses from them.
As he carved the timber, he shivered at the wood's strange touch which he said made him think of holy relics, and smelt 'of salt, sea and suffering'. He asked his parish priest to display a big, rough cross above the altar to remind the congregation of the migrants' desperate plight and he offered every migrant he saw a small cross as a symbol of their rescue and of hope for a new life. His work later became famous, especially when it was made the subject of a BBC news item.
Enter Cam Weston, a member of the Mornington congregation, who saw the news item and responded as instinctively as the carpenter had done. He emailed Francesco (O the miracles of modern connective technology!), asking if he would make our congregation such a cross: 'Here in Dunedin, in far off New Zealand, we are soon to have some refugees from Syria joining our community with the hope that they can establish a better life for themselves in this peaceful part of the world. My request is for one of your special crosses to reside in my local church to be here to welcome any refugees who may attend a service, as a symbol of our recognition of the suffering they have experienced before coming to our land...while we are not of the catholic faith we welcome all into our community, and will support the refugees as we can when they arrive.'
The reply came back by email, 'I understand what it needs, for me is fine, I just need to know the size in terms of the cross, I have to inform to know if I can get them the cross and the cost of shipping. Good evening. Best regards, Francesco Tuccio.'
And so sometime soon, a cross fashioned from the shattered timbers of a refugee boat crossing the Mediterranean, will be in place in Mornington Methodist Church as a reminder of the suffering that plagues our whole world and the sympathetic love that that suffering calls forth-as Jesus would have wished.
The British Museum has also requested such a cross-you can see pictures of it and its maker by going to Google and looking up the many websites for 'Lampedusa crosses'. The wood for the Museum cross was chosen carefully: It came from a boat which capsized off the coast of Lampedusa on 3 October 2013 with the loss of 366 lives; a disaster that prompted the Italian navy to launch their Mare Nostrum sea and rescue mission. Francesco later wrote, 'I was so happy and proud when the museum contacted me. And then I asked myself a question. 'If this message has reached such an important museum, visited by people from all over the world, is this enough to break down the wall in the hearts of people still indifferent to this terrible crisis?' The Museum director replied: 'It is hard to stand in front of that humble cross, in the middle of so many opulent and priceless exhibits, and not to be moved to tears. Its message is powerful, direct and so deeply sad.'
May we in Dunedin, and the people coming in the future to Mornington Methodist Church experience the same powerful message.
Colin Gibson