Over the past five years, migrants and refugees have flowed into Europe in unprecedented numbers. Some are converting to Christianity.
migrant crisis
Aid organizations are overwhelmed by the scale of the current mass migration from the Middle East. So the work has fallen on other volunteers.
Recently the online world has been filled with images of people in desperate conditions, images not from Pakistan or Syria but from the Greek islands closest to Turkey: Chios, Lesbos, Leros. One picture showed a migrant raft landing near sunbathing tourists on Kos, an island I once knew well. It was a way station on my yearly visits to the nearby island of Patmos, where St. John was once a refugee himself. I went there to visit another immigrant to Greece: a spiritual poet named Robert Lax, who was Thomas Merton’s best friend.