Here goes...

The other day, as part of my Holy Week spending time with those who experience the things Jesus experienced during his final week, I spent the day with homeless people. When you hear the ‘homeless’ what do you imagine? Probably fairly ragged, unkempt people with plastic bags, straggly beards and dirty clothes, people with little employment capacity, who had spent a good deal of their lives unemployed? Well there’s a fair bit of that but I found my preconceptions beginning to erode quite quickly. I’m ashamed to say I tweeted early that day that I was going to spend the day with ‘a bunch of homeless people’ to which one person replied that they were a bit uncomfortable with that description. And they were exactly right. Talking to several people over the day, I began to realise that ‘homeless’ is a fairly blunt category. This homeless drop-in centre in a church in central London had around 60 or so regulars but they were all there for different reasons. I spoke with one elderly woma...

I spent a day this week with a young asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and his friends. Jonathan is a gentle, unassuming and quiet 22-year-old, with a broad smile, who loves football, never really knew his father, and was brought up by a friend of his parents in Kinshasa. When he was a student, despite the fact that he and his friends were paying fees, the government defaulted on paying his university lecturers, and so lessons stopped. Jonathan joined a series of political demonstrations against the government, was caught taking a picture of the police and was duly arrested. He was bundled into a car, taken to an isolated spot, tied up and beaten. He still has nightmares recalling his torture at the hands of government agents. To cut a long story short, he eventually managed to get a visa to leave to the UK, as he had relatives here, hoping that things would die down a little before he would return home in due course. Phone calls with friends back in the DR...

On Monday I sat in on a senior meeting of the staff of a London prison, as they recounted the various incidents that had happened over the weekend. It was like listening to a tidal wave of pain. Half a dozen episodes of self-harm, several men found with ligatures around their necks threatening suicide, a number of fires set off in cells, rooms vandalised, a prison officer stabbed in the face by an out of control prisoner wielding a sharpened plastic knife. Visiting the segregation unit was sobering. The tiny rectangular cells, twelve feet by six, with a dirty window opening on a prison yard, were bare, stark, pitiless. The more extreme cases, like the man who stabbed the officer, had been placed in ‘special accommodation’, as a last resort to cool down – a dark, cold box room, with no light, not even a bed – nothing. It is hard to imagine a more desolate and desperate place. On rounds with one of the admirable Anglican Chaplains, I met a prisoner who, high on the unpredictable d...