|Advent: a refugee – a person without past and future| Rome, 17
December 2012 – What defines the existence of a refugee? A
journalist recently asked me this question on Swiss Radio. She
could have looked up the definition in the 1951 Geneva Refugee
Convention but then she was asking the question from an
existential rather than a legal viewpoint. What is the meaning
of being a refugee, what does it do to a person? A refugee is
someone whose past has been destroyed and whose future is
blocked: a person seemingly without a past or a future. Life as
a linear progression of past, present and future. We all have a
past and a future, which meet in the here-and-now. Most people
have a home, a place where they were born, grew up, went to
school, with family and friends, in a community based on a
shared culture, values and beliefs. Rooted in this past we build
the present and future, with dreams, career plans, opportunities
in education and our chosen profession. No past. For a refugee,
however, the past has been taken