Touching the sacred in migrations and her enemies

Migration is an old, eternal phenomenon. Currently, it is an urgent challenge involving huge numbers of people – men, women and children – forced to leave home in search of peace and hope, safety, and a better life. All graphically illustrated in images of over-full, fragile boats crossing seas, frequently ending in tragedy. Men, women and children drowned; life sacrificed on the altar of desperation. Migrants and migration also lie at the core of frenetic politics in the United States, Europe and more widely.

Contemporary mass migration, is located in a world of ‘polycrisis’: of pandemic, ecological fragility and despoliation, ‘natural’ disaster, war, political upheaval, economic and cultural instability, precarity and polarization, and growing pessimism about the future. A 2020 World Migration Report estimated there to be 270 million people compelled to leave their countries of origin and seek a new home. Nearly 15 million new internal displacements were recorded in 120 countries between January and June 2020. And a more recent UNHCR figure was of 120 million people worldwide, half of them children, forced to leave home, as referenced in a study of family life and migration (Johansen et al, 2025).

Dr Linden West is Professor Emeritus of Canterbury Christ Church University, and a celebrated researcher and writer. He is a distinguished scholar in the broad field of adult and transformative education as well as learner motivation and professional learning. He is also a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, drawing on (but not exclusively so) object relations/relational psychoanalytic perspectives. He brings insights from clinical work and training into understanding learning, popular education and what we might call transformative and transcendental experience. He is an historian of popular and workers’ education while his main contemporary interest has lain in the application of auto/biographical and narrative enquiry, and interdisciplinary psychosocial and spiritual perspectives, to diverse educational, social, cultural, political, psychological and religious phenomena. See more here