Did you know that the Holy Family were refugees? King Herod was search- ing for the newborn Jesus to kill him, so Joseph (the Gospel of Matthew tells us) “took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt.” Recent artists have been depicting the Holy Family as to- day’s refugees, and today’s refugees as the Holy Family.

Images of the Holy Family in flight have been a favorite among painters for hundreds of years. What’s new about these images recently, though, is their visual conflation with today’s millions of refugees world-wide.

Artists find various ways to portray this conflation. One is to depict a con- temporary family—father with mother holding baby—wearing jeans, T-shirts, and often backpacks, but with halos around their heads. Or artists title their painting “The Holy Family.” Or show a contemporary family running with grim faces past a line of people with backs turned to them (literally turning their backs on people in need).

Another way that artists have re- cently been representing the Holy Fam- ily as refugees is to start with a biblical- looking Holy Family, often on a donkey. Then they cast this family in a variety of contemporary situations.

I’ve seen drawings of the biblical Ho- ly Family walking toward a high chain-

Images of the Holy Family in flight have been a favorite among painters for hundreds of years.

link fence topped by barbed wire; also the family standing helplessly behind a similar fence. Other drawings depict the biblical Holy Family running for their lives.

A uniquely compelling representa- tion of the Holy Family as refugees is the installation outside of Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis. This past summer, life-sized statues of Jo- seph, Mary, and baby Jesus — deliber- ately in conventional portrayal — were placed on the grass; what isn’t conven- tional, what immediately shocks, is that they’re surrounded by a real chain- link fence topped by barbed wire.

As the Indianapolis Star reported it, the Episcopal church’s rector said the caged Holy Family is a protest to Presi- dent Trump’s zero-tolerance policy that is holding families in detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Bible tells us “to love our neighbors as ourselves,” the rector added.

I’m immensely grateful to the reli- gious leaders who commissioned these various works — and of course to the artists who created them. It’s hearten- ing, too, to see what a powerful role art can play in awakening us afresh to a horrific world-wide political situation, and moving us to act to repair it.

Peggy Rosenthal of Rochester is a writer who blogs at imagejournal.org.