The Home You Carry with You

The Christians of the Middle East weren’t disappearing. They were moving, starting over, still linked to the past. I realized the violence of a vocabulary that suggested that the moment they left, they no longer existed. The Syriac Catholic community of Qaraqosh had no physical church yet in Sydney, and so they rented a church from the Roman Catholics, and they drove from all corners of their new city to be there, coming together, as they always had, to pray – speaking Aramaic with one another and drinking coffee. The church was the deepest home. The church was the home that you carry with you – the home that can’t be taken, the body, merged together again.