Searching for God # 143

 As a neophyte, kindergartener, in the study of mass movements of people, I have learned that there is a different depiction between migration, a normal, historic, established pathways of movement of people in and out of various countries and another category labeled “human displacement.’ These people are displaced from their original homes, and include refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced persons. 

These next data points are taken from the International Organization on Migration website, from its World Migration Report 2026: Key Findings, in a section entitled Internal displacement: Trends, responses and solutions. 

• Human displacement remains significant, with nearly 118 million people displaced globally by the end of 2025, including refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced persons, reflecting the scale and persistence of protracted conflicts and compounding crises.  

• At the end of 2025, more than 82 million people were living in internal displacement. In the same year, there were over 62 million internal displacements/movements, which included 29.9 million associated with disasters and 32.2 million with conflict and violence.  

• Environmental disruption is now a defining feature of contemporary mobility, as record‑breaking temperatures, droughts, wildfires and storms increasingly interact with poverty, weak infrastructure and governance challenges to influence displacement, migration and immobility.  

• Hardening geopolitics, strategic rivalry and regional instability have intensified displacement dynamics, with major conflicts in contexts such as the Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, generating large-scale human suffering while testing multilateral cooperation and international law.  

• Technological acceleration, including the rapid uptake of artificial intelligence in border management, visa systems and labour markets, is reshaping migration governance and systems. While AI offers efficiency gains, it also raises concerns about bias, accountability, data protection and widening digital divides between and within States. 

From the website of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, iDMC.org, we read this in a piece entitled ‘Why does the number of IDP’s keep increasing?’: 

The rise in conflict in recent years in countries and territories such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine led to an increase in the number of IDP’s. They added to the tens of millions living in protracted displacement in countries such as Afghanistan Columbia, Syria and Yemen. The impacts of disasters on housing and livelihoods also meant that many people could not find durable solutions and were still displaced at the end of the year. 

Humanitarian aid alone will not suffice to reduce the scale of displacement. To help IDP’s put a sustainable end to their situation, governments need to set up policies and take actions that resolve conflicts and build peace, reduce poverty and disaster risk, and enable people to return, resettle, or locally integrate in host communities.  

In a section entitled, ‘Internal Displacements can happen anywhere,’ we read: 

There were 65.8 million internal displacements, or movements recorded in 2024. In the Gaza Strip and many other situations, people had to flee multiple times throughout the year as areas of conflict shifted, increasing their vulnerabilities and impeding their efforts to rebuild their lives. All but four of the 49 countries and territories that reported conflict displacement last year also reported disaster displacement. The nearly 45.8 million disaster displacements recorded across 163 countries and territories last year was the highest since we began monitoring disaster displacement in 2008. 

And here are some words of insight from Alexandra Bilak, iDMC director: 

Internal displacement is where conflict, poverty, and climate collide, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. These latest numbers prove that internal displacement is not just a humanitarian crisis; it’s a clear development and political challenge that requires far more attention than it currently receives... 

The cost of inaction is rising, and displaced people are paying the price. The data is clear, it’s now time to use it to prevent displacement, support recovery, and build resilience. 

This piece is starting to read like a rapid-fire data gun firing ‘data-bullets’ at readers, as if to suggest that this scribe is subscribing and submitting to the ‘demographics’ and the clinical categories, policy recommendations, budgetary requirements and ‘peace’ idealism. In the most expert circles of all of our various ‘areas’ or ‘files’ of human crisis, disaster, and analysis, we impose the kind of academic diagnosis which we ascribe to other medical, political, social, environmental and even cultural ‘issues’. The numbers of victims, the causes of their victimhood, the potential remedies for that victimhood and the various elite conferences, workshops, seminars, graduate degrees and government legislation....what we don’t write, talk, or often even consider are the individual human beings whose lives have been, and will continue to be turned upside down, likely for decades if not forever. 

65.8 million internal displacements, for perspective, represents a population number equivalent to 1.5 Canada’s. Of course the IDP numbers are not concentrated in a single country, or even a single continent. And their respective destinies lie in the hands of multiple governments, many of which are clearly struggling with the burden of ‘care’. In some sense, the burden is so massive that it rarely can be adequately embraced either or both intellectually or emotionally. Detachment, objectivity, academic disciplines, scientific pursuit of empirical date...all these are cornerstones of both research and any potential policy developments that might be taken seriously by those making governmental decisions. 

Immediacy, in the form of the local crisis de jour, because it, like gossip, captures both the attention of the local populace and any media who might pick it up, necessarily rises to the level of most local and regional politicians. Reactivity, spontaneous often both surprised and often angry reactivity that will invariably colour the perceptions, attitudes and actions of the political class and pour stain on the issue of potential accommodation of newcomers, irrespective of their origin or reasons for seeking help. 

Any paradigm shift in the manner in and by which the world begins to ‘address’ the migration issues, including those of displaced persons, needs at least two essentials:  

*at least a neutral openness (neither highly negative, nor overly optimistic) to welcoming and integrating those newcomers and 

* a locally developed, disseminated and public debated plan that plants seeds of hope in greater numbers than pills of hate 

On the other side of the coin, that of the migrants, refugees, IDP’s and asylum seekers, there needs to be a different kind of openness, this time to the resource that is embodied in the lived experience of those needing refuge. Rarely in the monitoring reports do we read of ‘listening to, welcoming of and integrating the needs of the migrants as they perceive and express them, 

We live in a culture of fixers and those in need of fixing. Rarely do the fixers open their minds, ears, eyes and hearts to the totally authentic ‘descriptions’ of the situation of the people in need, except to name the ‘presenting issue’. It takes considerable time, patience, training and dedication to exercise the degree of empathy, without pity, in the situation, like in a large, busy emergency hospital in a large city, teeming with incoming cases, harried and exhausted medical staff and limited resources, beds, equipment and medications. Emergency rooms are comparably well equipped, staffed and highly-efficient operations under the supervision and administration of highly trained professionals. They are also locally located, meaning that health care workers, for the most part, live near where they work. 

In many situations, humanitarian agencies send their staff and volunteers into areas remote from their homes, with limited resources to face the complex and often intractable issues of a complex wave of migrants. There is little if any ‘press coverage’ and less if any public consciousness of the situations on the ground, among those whose offices and job descriptions enable them to work ‘digitally’...and thereby to detach while perhaps directing staff and volunteers on the ground. This work, generally, too, bears none of the attractive inducements of professional medical or social work in urban centres where budgets and planning is more transparently and accountably prepared and delivered. 

A system stretched thin, for many significant and rapidly changing reasons, can and will attract highly-motivated, altruistic, compassionate and dedicated men and women whose capacity to learn, risk, grow and adapt to seriously challenging situations that overlap the issues of politics, economics, racism, religion, poverty, disease, education, policy and planning, as well as leadership and execution (of plans).  Foundationally the system is also foundering in a sea of exacerbating political conflicts and ideologies, religious tensions, competing funding and investment opportunities, and a world and national governance trend that is increasingly succumbing to various forms of nationalism, isolationism, exclusion and supremacy. 

It is not only the rise in military spending that is concerning; it is also the apparent reduction in what we might, looking back a few years, consider to have been a higher level of empathy, compassion, identification with the underdog, and far less general cultural bullying. Meanness, hate, revenge, bitterness and dog-eat-dog are all words that can legitimately be ascribed to the culture of developed nations. Whether there is an actual rise in those tendencies, or more a release of these attributes previously hidden in a world confounded and often paralyzed by instant digital connection with its accompanying anonymity, immunity and secrecy is a subject for sociological and social psychological research. 

While refugee and migrant committees find some fertile ground in and among local parishes of various religious denominations, the work of those committees, for the most part, is concentrated in the provision of necessary staples, introduction to work opportunities and/or language learning access, health care access, housing and some social integration. Rarely, if ever, do those committees engage, unless in some government survey, with the policy or political class, where they might be able to enlighten what their are finding in their encounters. Political action, not only compassion, empathy, altruism and volunteerism is needed at all levels, starting with the migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers and IDP’s. Those who are responsible for the work of monitoring, caring for and sustaining those people whose needs cry out to the world (mostly in silence) can also shift their mandate from what might be considered ‘street-care’ workers in drug-infected urban area, to a must more egalitarian, open and far less patronizing, condescending hierarchical approach. 

The burden of privilege, social status, wealth and both education and professional employment notwithstanding, we are all in need of clean air, clean water, healthy food, access to health care and education, work with dignity and personal, home and national security...That burden has, and continues to, keep us from opening our hearts, minds, wallets and imaginations to a universal, growing, inescapable and unstoppable tidal wave of men, women and children, mostly resulting from the malfeasance of those whom we have either elected or appointed to represent us. 

There is no religion worthy of the name, whose potential commitment, understanding, identification and empathic dedication to the shared opportunity of beginning to see and to orient and to inspire and even to recruit their flock to some new forms of perception, orientation and dedication to this universal human need that is not an honourable embodiment of their faith. And given the division of perceptions, orientations, policies, planning, execution methods among the professionally already engaged, there is a wide open opportunity for all faith communities to engage in a common, collaborative and sustainable ministry to give ‘voice’ to the millions of ‘voiceless.’ 

All forms and faces, histories and visions of all deities can be legitimately assumed to applaud.