Everyone is welcome

Monthly Letter

Strangers in the Land

October 2025

This weekend, I saw on television, far right groups carry crosses, dress up as Knights templar – and use, as a rallying speech, the beginning of the Lord’s prayer. It seems that the far right in the UK would like to hook into ‘faith’ as a driver for their aims in the way it appears to sit in the USA. I was deeply troubled and I know others of you were too. That Jesus should be presented as ranged against people seeking safety (asylum) is almost worse than his followers in the church being seen to hide abuse. But as I recoiled from the image of the cross held as threat, I also felt strangely stilled by the presence of the symbol of Christ’s suffering in the midst of all that anger.

Recently, I re-read Primo Levi’s ‘If This is a Man’; the account of his time in Auschwitz. In his introduction he says, he writes the memoir not to add to the knowledge of the Holocaust, but rather as a study of aspects of the human mind. He said that within nearly all of us there is a belief that the ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this lies hidden and is not rationally justified. But when it surfaces as a major premise, then, at the end of the chain , there is the ‘Larger’ (his word for the concentration camps). Whilst we allow the belief to exist, the conclusion remains to threaten us. He writes his book as warning I suppose.

Watching the telly on Saturday, I was thinking, ‘There, that is what Levi was talking about! They see strangers as enemies, and where will that take us?!’. But the crosses paused me. Undoubtedly it was me, in that moment, who was seeing enemies. For they were strangers to me. But Christ was present, as always and calls me to a different response.

On Sunday Fran prayed for us all to be given wisdom, love and understanding, especially of minds and thoughts that seem strange to our own. It was a good prayer.

Rev Kate Plant