Identities in search of refuge: who are we? People who, sometimes, often, or too often, willingly or under duress, and for various reasons, leave their country, creating or causing changes in their identity: traveller, exiled, displaced, asylum seeker, stateless, refugee...

There is now an umbrella term for people who are on the move, having left their "home" and crossed various political, social, economic, cultural, ethnic, religious… borders: the "migrant". In this context, the "migrant" is characterized by a transnational and multicultural identity, and it is the term circulating in news reports.

But this identity, as defined above, is also a bridge between those who have left their country and those who have not (yet) moved by way of a spatial migration.

Because of the new proximity, or even the hospitality, experienced or planned, with people coming from elsewhere, the "sedentary" person is compelled to discover that they too are, somewhere, in their history or deep within themselves, migrants. Perhaps their plight calls us to ignore borders, which seek to demarcate and protect a territory, to break down walls, however high, which shelter us, and barriers and fences which separate us from others. Willingly or unwillingly, human life is played out in an open space, in exchanges and relationships.

Going beyond the reciprocal exchanges, we come together as migrants, all of us, to build and enrich a renewed culture at a crossroads, according to each of our individual freedoms, between assimilation, which tends to limit the newcomer, forcing him to adopt fully the host culture, leaving aside his own, and a communalistic grouping that wants to firmly keep its "own" culture, rejecting any external input. In order to promote a path of co-insertion and the journeying together, everyone is asked to contribute, on behalf of their migrant, unique, special or indeed universal humanity.

On June 20, 2016, World Refugee Day, let’s remember, among other things, our collective human history as free or forced migrants. "Man is a refugee to man." Together, as migrants, let’s accept our migrations.

Gilbert

The Carmel of Saint-Joseph and the Josefa Foundation

Are we not all journeying, together, everyone, potentially or actually, being enriched by one another, as a result of each other? No person is a stranger on this earth and each person can become whatever he makes of what others think of him.

Who, better than ourselves, can truly speak of our own migrations, either free or forced?

We should, at this point, take a moment to remember all those who have suffered or currently suffer from forced migration.

What then can be said about our history? That war and peace inhabit our all too humane humanity; that the land of exile and the land of hospitality are one and the same, one land of which we are responsible for preserving the present and the future, for its guests of tomorrow.

Why then have the Carmelites of Saint-Joseph and the Josefa Foundation united their mission? To live more deeply the mystery of hospitality! This hospitality that brings us together, throughout the world, and allows us to move forward; with the intent to build a true fellowship, in the footsteps of Abraham, the quintessential host (as a reminder, Josefa is open to all, whether on a cultural or religious journey).

The Carmel of Saint-Joseph and the Josefa Foundation are looking to us so that together we will ensure that the Josefa House never loses the memory of its migration and its mission of housing and hospitality.

So, what is our will? To produce fruit, together, with those who join us, who will join us in the heart of the Josefa House so that we may be, together, faithful to our hospitable humanity, whether as a guest or as a host.

Josefa, most importantly, is about accepting the wealth of our vulnerabilities; it’s about embracing the conversion of our perspective, towards others, towards ourselves, and therefore renewing our view, my view, of the one who, as a foreigner, offers the gift of hospitality.

So together with all of you, let’s ardently wish that the Josefa House may offer hospitality and peace, in abundance, to all of us migrants.

While already lying dormant in the minds and hearts of some of us, we received it as a gift in the course of the initial meetings of the Josefa Foundation’s founding members.

It offers itself to us, to you, and invites us to dwell in it.

Josefa, as a name, refers to a person, the person, because the Josefa Foundation intends that the human person be at the heart of its mission.