The W(a/o)nderer

Religion and Roots: The Danger of a Monolithic Story Part I

2012-02-16T07:48:00.004-06:00

I stumbled across a problem as I read through Stephen Prothero’s God is Not One. My worldview chart in front of me, I read chapters on Christianity, Confucianism, and atheism (as well as Kupperman’s excellent chapter on Marx), skimming Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, and Yoruba. And my pen, prepared to document three diverging worldviews, rarely scratched the surface because I knew that worldviewing differences do not simply occur between worldviews but within worldviews. Certainly, generalities can be made, which is why a book like Prothero’s is possible, but it is nearly impossible to determine what religious adherents think in the abstract. In fact, too much generalizing can be dangerous: we construct monolithic designations that are then forced down on people we have not even met, instead of letting definitions rise up out of the singularity of an encounter with the other.

Prothero does do an extraordinary job of allowing the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the joyous and the tragic to sit in tension with one another. Because, in the end, that is life, and religion is after all a response to life, observation and participation. “By their fruit you will know them,” and religious fruit has been some of the most sweet and the most bitter. Put another way, the church is a whore, but she has also given birth to some of the world’s most devoted servants. And yet, my concerns about monolithic generalizations still stand. A good friend, after reading Prothero’s chapter on Islam, admitted to an extreme prejudice toward that religion because of its views on women. This is certainly something that concerns me, but this concern is not relegated only to Islam. And to say that Islam has a view of women makes no sense in light of hermeneutics, the varied sects and traditions within Islam, and the fact that not all devout Muslims suppress women. The danger for my friend is that this chapter could blind her to actual Muslims who do not share those views, to other Koranic passages, and to alternative interpretations (Footnote: I should add here that this friend has since visited with a Muslim classmate who began to dispel preconceived generalizations, an encounter which only supports my claims). It would be irresponsible to gloss over texts of terror, but it would also be irresponsible to assume that our superficial readings are automatically accurate. One New Atheist-sounding friend decries the absolute evil of religion while claiming Gandhi and Martin Luther King as heroes; he explains that they were men ahead of their time who tapped in to universal scientific values by inadvertently eschewing their confining religious trappings. My only response to such violent reductionism was laughter.

So let us imagine that a conflict erupts, or festers. And let’s assume it’s in the Middle East. And a Christian, a Confucian, and an atheist rush to the scene in order to diagnose the cause of the Israel/Palestine struggle. A Christian might say that human sin is the underlying problem and salvation will, as the word implies, save; a Confucian could confess that order is called for, because this conflict smacks of the human dilemma of chaos; and an atheist might laugh at both and say reason will wash away the blood flowing because of religion itself. At this point, I can’t help but ask which Christian walked up: a Southern Baptist fundamentalist or a Latin American liberation theologian, or a more moderate third option? And what exactly is meant by sin and salvation, because such narrative concepts have meant extremely different things? Did the Confucian come from Beijing or from Boston, and from what time period in Chinese history? And was this a friendly or angry atheist: Terry Eagleton or Christopher Hitchens? I could probably relate what some friends might think who fall along these spectrums, but even they are so diverse, constituted by constellations of byzantine intricacy.

Religion does not have a pure Platonic essence separate from history and culture, time and place. Come to think of it, nothing does. There is no universal image of a tree: people tend to imagine leaves and bark familiar to where they grew up. In this way, universality is only achieved through particularity. Furthermore, religion is a Western term and it is not until the modern European Enlightenment that everything gets unthreaded and relegated to their own little islands. As I read Prothero, I could not keep things so unthreaded, and I certainly could not locate my “worldview” in one single chapter. I couldn’t help transgressing those boundaries. My heritage is Christian, but there was much in the chapter with which I no longer resonate (including classical theism; even though it’s overly simplistic, for the sake of shaking things up I like to joke with Christian and atheist friends that I’m religious, not spiritual). As I read about Confucianism, I nodded in full agreement concerning virtue ethics and community, but scribbled question marks in the margins next to defenses of patriarchy and rigidly hierarchical government. While I might pass for an atheist in some circles, the grating one-note diatribes of the New Atheists and other fundamentalists remind me of Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber: “Hey, wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world?!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cVlTeIATBs

Perhaps my past reading in these areas, not to mention my relationships with flesh and blood, has ruined me to short distillations that sum up an entire historical tradition in a simple problem/solution equation. As good as Prothero’s book is (specifically his nuanced introduction and conclusion), the fact that a Western academic is briefly distilling ancient evolving traditions is important to keep in mind. Of all the religions discussed, I am the least unfamiliar with Christianity and I know it to be profoundly complex and interpretable, though I certainly think there are worse interpretations and better interpretations (usually ones aware of sociopolitical and literary context). Considering Prothero’s description of atonement and Christian history, his Episcopalian upbringing seemed to be an inevitably important player: streams within religions do not simply differ on externals, but also on the internal meaning as well. Having said that, I wonder what Hindus, Buddhists, and Yorubans would say to their respective treatments. Maintaining a conjoined sense of particularity and generality may be difficult, but it is necessary. As such, I don’t think the problem is inherently ignorance about other religions; it is the arrogance that assumes that even in our ignorance we know everything there is to know about the religious other. Humility and hospitality offered generously toward the unknown, toward the stranger and alien in the land, makes the most sense, because we would certainly not want someone to define our identity before having met us. “Do unto others . . .”

Our identities are shaped by streaming tributaries that converge in our lives, sometimes gently and sometimes turbulently. I have a mosaic of influences that continues to deconstruct and reconstruct me: literature and literary theory, communitarianism, Continental philosophy, bioregionalism and permaculture, natural and social sciences, Critical Theory, philosophy of religion, postcolonial histories, socioliterary and historical-contextual biblical interpretation, not to mention experiences, conversations, and all the things of which I’m not even aware. If there is predestination then it must be how we are somewhat determined by our own stories, our own historical, cultural, geographic, genetic contexts. We are only free in that determination.

My father is a family doctor who dedicated twenty years of his life to serving the uninsured in the impoverished Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee. We moved to rural Jellico when I was two years old in order to pay off medical school debt before relocating to Honduras. However, my parents’ roots supplanted their plans and they devoted themselves to revitalizing the struggling non-profit healthcare center, community hospital, and country clinics. Those hills and its people and their stories spoke too deeply to leave.

They spoke deeply, nourishing like Southern hospitality, porch conversations and folk music, four-part harmonies and leaves turned into chimes by the wind, dogwood flowers and honeysuckle in the spring and fiery colors in the Autumnal hills. They spoke deeply, haunting like twelve-year olds getting pregnant, a Xanax-addicted girl whose landlord collected the monthly rent from her bed, drug rates and chronic unemployment proportional to major urban centers, a woman with a labyrinth of scars across her stomach from when her mother doused her in gasoline and drew the scars with cigarette fire, a dying town and raped mountains sucked dry by coal mining. My dad often told me that any understanding of the world or of God, whatever that means, must first make sense in the generational poverty and strip-mined mountains in Appalachia, at the gates of Auschwitz, or the walled ghettos of the West Bank and Gaza. Most do not. Without such understandings, I will smugly declare that my reality is normality while ignoring that it is in many ways a façade constructed from the ruins of other lives and places. I will decide that I have no past and therefore no responsibility to the past, the present, the future, or to place. The stories I was told growing up, and in which I strive to reside, re-imagined religion, fundamentally and etymologically, as what binds us back to the wreckage and gift of the beautiful risk of life. From before I can remember, these stories—of history and literature, of people we knew, and parables and narratives from religious traditions—have informed me and shaped me, renewed me and subverted me.

The Nature of Work: Earth, Community, and Healing Alienation Part III

2012-02-12T09:27:00.002-06:00

Activist and theologian Ched Myers asserts that some early monastic communities provide an example of just such a transformation. Certain monastic communities believed that the project of civilization is constructed on the centralization and exploitation of wealth; if that is the case, then communities should become as self-sufficient as possible (Myers, 1994, p. 182). Furthermore, they claimed that exploitation and wealth stratification stem from the alienation of human labor, so in order to restore dignity and respect (as opposed to humiliation and shame), they centered their communal lives around shared manual, and therefore unalienated, work (ibid, p. 182). Contemporary examples include the worker-owned cooperatives of Mondragon (Clark, 2002, pp. 397-399); the agrarian local democracies of Kerala, India (ibid, pp. 399-400); and the grassroots cleanup and urban agriculture of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston (ibid, pp. 401-402), to name only a very few.

Such examples highlight the need for meaningful engagement with other living things which, as mentioned previously, can help heal trauma (Suzuki, 2007, p. 257). In a statement that supports the notion of a permaculture farm and education center, Suzuki points out that mental health is enriched through horticultural activities: “gardens are becoming an integral part of the healing therapies at schools, nursing homes, hospitals, prisons and more” (ibid, p. 257). Not only is this due to humanity’s need for intimacy with the natural world, but due also to the connection between the mind and body, both of which are engaged by good work just as they are engaged by art, music, dancing, and repetitive rhythms, all of which excite the hypothalamus while simultaneously suppressing self-conscious orientation (Clark, 2002, p. 228).

Recognizing this connection is crucial to this argument because, as Mark Clark states, the human mind is the body “plus all its relationships” (ibid, p. 162). We cannot escape the intricate web of relatedness, even within our own bodies. Our bodies cannot heal alone, as if they existed in isolation (Berry, 2002, p. 99), because healing is conviviality (ibid, p. 99), which includes the deep felt needs of belonging and purposeful meaning. The process of healing restores the connections within our bodies (Clark, 2002, p. 228) and between our bodies and the world. In fact, the word health stems from an Old English word meaning wholeness, and so healing is the renewal of wholeness.

Peter Levine emphasizes this wholeness in his research on the physiological effects of trauma. He declares that the “key to healing traumatic symptoms in humans is in our physiology” (Levine, 1997, p. 17). Animal bodies, including humans, have evolved instinctual mechanisms that keep them safe, including the freeze/immobility strategy (ibid, p. 95), which “often leads to human trauma” (ibid, p. 97) because of our learnt inability to discharge extreme trauma energy (ibid, p. 35). However, animals rarely suffer from trauma because, once they determine the threat has passed, “they often begin to vibrate, twitch, and lightly tremble” (ibid, p. 97), which are the “organism’s way of regulating extremely different states of nervous system activation” (ibid, p. 98). Because of this, wild animals should be our teachers in trauma healing because they portray “nature in balance” (ibid, p. 98). If we humans allowed the fluid and adaptive biological response to run its course we could ameliorate the symptoms (ibid, p. 37). Therefore, humans have much to learn by studying and experiencing the natural world because not only are we healed by acknowledging our connection to nature, but we are also healed by imitating nature. This gives further credence to permaculture and bioregionalism (see McGinnis, 1999; Carr, 2004).

Much more elaborative and practical work must be done, including detailed accounts of specific case studies, but this sketch provides a developing basis for future praxis. Even so, I am committed to participating in the cultural renewal of communities that foster an “ethic of interdependence, partnership, and limiting violence (Schirch, 2004, p. 15) and that also recognize their place within natural ecosystems. Furthermore, recognition of connection to nature and to one another through imagination and the creativity of shared work manifest restorative justice and trauma healing.

A permaculture farm and education center can take seriously the nature and practice of community articulated here, and restorative justice could benefit from this definition that potentially addresses social harms as well as ecological devastation, in which humans are also offenders. Sustainability, maintaining a dynamic equilibrium, can only make sense if human societies and cultures learn from the structures and functions of their local ecosystems that exhibit self-renewal and resilience, stability and mutability, rootedness and longevity. Meaningful work and actual craft can also be provided for people, especially as urban agriculture and eco-building spread more and more widely. And in this case, viable jobs and skills transform alienation by fusing with the therapy of the natural world and the therapy of engaging both the mind and the body in creative acts. The traumatic effects on offenders of harming others can be just as crippling as the victims’ experience (Yoder, 2005, p. 14), which only strengthens the argument made here. These diversified places of play, education, and work “create safe spaces in which to heal” (Schirch, 2004, pp. 46-48) for both victims and offenders, separately and possibly together through forms of Victim Offender Conferencing.

Lorraine Stuzman Amstutz laments that a critical issue in VOC and other restorative justice approaches is its currently individualistic nature (Stuzman Amstutz, 2009, p. 80) even though community is central to restorative justice processes. This is understandable to a certain extent, because VOC is usually seen as a curative rather than a preventative. However, locating this process in an agroecosystem begins to erode the dichotomy between preventing and healing and gives the communal aspect of restorative justice some livability, without which it vaporizes in abstraction and the status quo persists. The name Victim Offender Conferencing almost begs for this to occur: in Latin, to confer simply means “to bring together.” An integrative vision weaving together nature, community, healing, and work is worthy of a restorative name.

References

Berry, W. (1993). Sex, economy, freedom, and community: Eight essays. New York City: Pantheon Books.

Berry, W. and Wirzba, N. (Ed.). (2002). The art of the commonplace: The agrarian essays of Wendell Berry. Berkeley: Counterpoint.

Block, P. (2009). Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Carr, M. (2004). Bioregionalism and civil society: Democratic challenges to corporate globalism. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Clark, M. E. (2002). In search of human nature. New York: Routledge.

Davis, E. F. (2009). Scripture, culture, and agriculture: An agrarian reading of the bible. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gilligan, J. (2001). Preventing violence. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Holmgren, D. (2004). Essence of permaculture. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from Holmgren Design Services Website: http://www.holmgren.com.au/

Kupperman, J.J. (2010). Theories of human nature. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

McGinnis, M. V. (1999). Bioregionalism. New York: Routledge.

Myers, C. (1994). Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world Christians. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Schirch, L. (2004). The little book of strategic peacebuilding. Intercourse: Good Books.

Stuzman Amstutz, Lorraine. (2009). The little book of victim offender conferencing: Bringing victims and offenders together in dialogue. Intercourse: Good Books.

Suzuki, D. with McConnell, A. & Mason, A. (2007). The sacred balance: Rediscovering our place in nature. (3rd ed.). Berkeley: GreyStone Books.

Yoder, C. (2005). The little book of trauma healing: When violence strikes and community security is threatened. Intercourse: Good Books.

Zehr, H. (2002). The little book of restorative justice. Intercourse: Good Books.

The Nature of Work: Earth, Community, and Healing Alienation Part II

2012-02-11T13:36:00.003-06:00

Rooted in “ecological science and systems theory” (Holmgren, 2004, p. 4) as well as community research, religious traditions, and native cultures of place (ibid, p. 6), permaculture stems from three interrelated ethical maxims: “Care for the earth (husband soil, forests and water)”; “Care for people (look after self, kin and community)” ; and “Fair share (set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus)” (ibid, p. 6). Furthermore, the word permaculture not only means permanent and sustainable agriculture but also permanent and sustainable culture (ibid, p. 1). Bill Mollison, one of the co-originators of the concept, maintains that a stable social order is not possible without some form of permanent agroecology (Carr, 2004, p. 150) and method of human habitat design, which has too often reinforced our schism with nature (Suzuki, 2007, p. 261). Permaculture’s design principles are applicable from the home garden scale to entire cities (Carr, 2004, p. 152) as well as to politics and economics. In permaculture’s view, caring for people and caring for the earth cannot be divorced from one another, and caring for the former cannot happen without caring for the latter. Human societies can and should be based on mutualisms in natural ecosystems, such as mycorrhizal fungi on tree roots, in order to foster a “fundamental ethic of interdependence and kinship” (ibid, p. 150).

This suggestion is not an impossible pipedream. David Suzuki reminds us that for nearly all of human existence we lived wholly immersed in nature and are still utterly dependent on it (Suzuki, 2007, p. 255). Ninety-nine percent of human existence has been lived in small egalitarian hunter-gatherer/horticultural band societies that imitated their bioregional habitats (ibid, p. 248), which was and is the norm for many indigenous cultures. Because of this ecological context of human evolution, Suzuki argues, it is extremely probable that the human genome has “a genetically programmed need to be in the company of other species” (ibid, p. 256). The biologist and myrmecologist E. O. Wilson coined the term biophilia to describe this engrained need, defined as “‘the innate tendency to focus on life and life-like processes,’” thus producing an emotional connection between humans and other forms of life (ibid, p. 256) that will certainly be culturally shaped and embodied. Because of this, Suzuki asserts that it is scientifically verifiable that human creatures have an evolved need for intimacy with nature and, citing Roger S. Ulrich, purports that much of humanity’s search for meaning and fulfillment depends on our relationship to the earth (ibid, p. 259).

Mary Clark agrees by claiming that purposeful meaning and a sense of belonging comprise two of humanity’s most basic needs (Clark, 2002, p. 364). These two central needs, along with the need for nature, have enormous power to heal trauma, and Clark also references research by Ulrich which suggests that views of nature substantially reduce time needed to recover from surgery (ibid, pp. 226-227). On a similar note, inmates in a Michigan state prison with cell windows viewing farms and forest required twenty-four percent fewer medical visits than inmates with windows facing the interior courtyard (Suzuki, 2007, p. 257).

Moreover, Clark stresses that humans need interactive communities, which means “belonging in a physical place, shared by known others,” because without “this grounding in [our] physical surroundings,” community disintegrates into apathetic societies (ibid, p. 395). As perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson notes, sentient beings can only survive if they actively explore their surroundings, which requires that they actually physically move through them (ibid, p. 164). This physical movement concretizes and contextualizes recognition of place and begins to uncover both preventative and curative approaches to trauma and violence. Indeed, Clark suggests that the nature and practice of community presented here, which reflectively roots humanity within the earth’s ecosystems, can begin to address both our human and environmental problems (ibid, p. 306). We won’t save places we don’t love, and we can’t love places we don’t know, and we can’t know places with which we aren’t intimately familiar. Perhaps some exceptions are conceivable, but proximity matters: where I live, who I live there with, and how I live define my relationship to the world.

From his Kentucky farm, Wendell Berry submits that the name of this relationship to the world is work, and the name of an appropriate relationship to the earth is good work (Berry, 1993, p. 35). For Berry, good work is given shape in particularity, because the diversity of the world and of those who work is contextually shaped and named (ibid, p. 36). But this particularity is informed by the common need to consciously and carefully decide “[h]ow we take our lives from this world, how we work, what work we do, how well we use the materials we use, and what we do with them after we have used them” (ibid, p. 109) because caring for the earth is an ancient responsibility, and one that must be done well if humanity is to survive (Berry, 2002, p. 46).

Clearly, by work I do not mean any task done in exchange for payment or something grueling which distracts us from more productive pursuits. I mean work, at least good work, as the union of the body and mind in creative and responsible engagement with the world. In this case, work and play are not antithetical. Permaculture’s rigorous design principles and cooperatively-managed agroecosystems reduce the amount of labor hours because they let ecological succession to take its course, thus allowing far more leisure time. This is important because, as psychiatrist James Gilligan notes, unalienated labor is only possible if it expresses “spontaneous and voluntary creativity, curiosity, playfulness, initiative, and sociability—that is, the sense of solidarity with the community, the fulfillment of one’s true and ‘essential’ human nature as ‘social’ and ‘political’ animals, to be fulfilled and made human by their full participation in a culture” (Gilligan, 2001, p. 103).

This articulation resonates with traditional societies that believed good work is the en-fleshing of wisdom, which is not only intellectual but is “any activity that stands in a consistently productive relationship to the material world and nurtures the creative imagination” (Davis, 2009, p. 144). Imagination must include the ability to conceive of others not ourselves, including humans, nonhumans, and places, and so work, if it is to be good work, in one place cannot deal destructively with other places. If society is interconnected, then this imagination must be focused on victims and offenders as well.

Unfortunately, modern Western societies have unimaginatively prized the intellectual at the expense of the physical and the ordinary, even if such work is skilled, to the extent that such work is shamed (ibid, p. 144). While Karl Marx never questioned capitalism’s foundation on progressive industrialism, and so did not make the distinction made here between work and good work, he nevertheless attacked this alienation of labor. According to Marx, modern life is tainted by alienation, which can only be remedied by the fair opportunity to pursue a desirable life (Kupperman, 2010, p. 145), understood as “a balanced work life and also satisfactory connections with other human beings in general” (ibid, p. 143), which should sound familiar by now. The present division of labor, however, prevents this balance because workers are alienated from work: they have no ownership or input into the kind of work being done (ibid, p. 148) because they are mechanistically relegated to one simplified task in an operation system (ibid, p. 149). As such, alienation chips away at any possible participation in meaningful community (Clark, 2002, p. 25). Economic and social arrangements must be transformed in order for diversified modes of fulfilling work to take place. Such could be the case in networked and diversified urban or rural permaculture systems that viewed work like Berry and Gilligan, a movement already happening.

The Nature of Work: Earth, Community, and Healing Alienation Part I

2012-02-10T21:19:00.002-06:00

Humans are inextricably connected to the earth. We inhabit, breathe, drink, and eat this strange blue globe that is our only home. The oldest religious traditions recognized this scientific fact by weaving stories, almost myths-as-memory, which describe humans as creatures crafted from the dirt: adam and adama, human and humus, culture and cultivate. Indeed, the plurality of human cultures grows from natural biodiversity. And we are social animals, dependent for better or worse on other lives beyond ourselves. The peacebuilding practice of restorative justice recognizes this by believing that society is interconnected (Zehr, 2002, p. 19), a belief that reframes crime as the cause and effect of damaged relationships (ibid, p. 20). According to medical biologist and physicist Peter Levine, damaged relationships and disconnection from a sense of belonging lie at the root of violence and trauma (Levine, 1997, p. 266). If this is true, then the proper response to crime, to the “violation of people and interpersonal relationships,” is the obligation to make things as right as possible (Zehr, 2002, p. 19), which includes the rehabilitation of the offender.

But rehabilitation to what? If crime is both personal and societal (ibid, p. 12), and these two are interconnected, then simply rehabilitating offenders to this broken locus, especially after the alienating and shaming force of prison, can perpetuate the cycle of violence, certainly evident in recidivism and incarceration rates (see Gilligan, 2001). The current legal system also alienates victims in the emphasis on crime as an offense to the state. Biologist Mary E. Clark points out that excessive physical or psychological trauma, such as that experienced in crime, alters the very structure of the brain, and if healing does not occur after the initial stress, then victims may not be able to integrate into healthy and comfortable social settings (Clark, 2002, p. 63). If restorative justice is right, however, then situating crime in the nexus of social relatedness demands the restoration of society itself, which should include the realization that we are also embedded in nonhuman life.

Which brings me once again to the intimate human connection with the natural world. This realization is necessary for right relationships and a healthy culture. And so is the need for belonging and for participation in meaningful and creative work. I am therefore arguing for the union of unalienated work, nature, community, healing, and place. This union can deeply inform preventative and responsive approaches of restorative justice and trauma healing. The topic is personal because it foresees work I hope to do in the future with a close group of friends. In order to embody the proposed argument and vision of this paper, we have discussed the potential of a permaculture farm and education center as a site for restorative justice and trauma healing. A permaculture-based agroecosystem could serve as an ideal place for the emotionally and physically draining meetings of Victim Offender Conferencing. Furthermore, the farm could be a transitional home for people recently released from prison and who have struggled with addictions and homelessness where viable skills and crafts are learned and a sense of belonging is cultivated.

In a way, such a farm and community would microcosmically incarnate an alternative configuration of society envisioned by restorative justice. Meaningful work and practical skills are important and cannot be undervalued, and neither can the sense of belonging found in authentic community. The nature and practice of community is vital to the vision presented here. A working definition of this elusive term must be offered in order to ground the following conversation. The term has been stretched like a balloon in contemporary parlance, evidenced in expansive expressions such as the “academic community,” the “online community,” the “global community,” etc. Such combinations might realize our interconnectedness, but they also dilute “community” of any bioregional emphasis, local mutuality, and ultimately interdependence. This modern dilution, or delusion, depends on what Mary Clark labels the Billiard Ball Gestalt, which sees everything as “isolated, discrete objects that have distinct boundaries” (Clark, 2002, p. 6), a worldview which geneticist and environmentalist David Suzuki contends ultimately confines humans to their own minds as “separate individuals acting on and relating to other separate individuals and on a lifeless, dumb world beyond the body” (Suzuki, 2007, p. 275). And so community ironically retains a pathological individualism (ibid, p. 263): we may be connected, but only as long as nothing is required of us.

This worldview results in fragmentation, loneliness, separation, and the fear of death, summed up in the word alienation: “[w]e are strangers in the world, we no longer belong (ibid, p. 275). Systems based on extreme individualism, like the legal/judicial structure, result in overcrowded prisons (Clark, 2002, p. 331) and heighten an offender’s experience of alienation (Zehr, 2002, p. 16). Clark offers the Indra’s Net Gestalt as an alternative hermeneutic, in which we interpret the world as connected, interdependent, and interacting in bodies, economies, social arrangements, and ecosystems (Clark, 2002, p. 9). While not an absolutist picture of reality (ibid, p. 12), Indra’s Net has the potential to counter alienation by cultivating a sense of belonging. Societal beliefs have a habit of constructing the behaviors they articulate, and so the question becomes which reality we wish to inhabit.

Design consultant and writer Peter Block contends that “[c]ommunity is fundamentally an interdependent human system given form by the conversation it holds with itself” (2009, p. 30), stressing context as belief systems and ways of speaking (ibid, p. 15). This is surely true, so at times we must shift our context, or perhaps reinterpret and re-imagine it. But, like a community, a conversation itself is also given form, and therefore must take place in and with someplace. Context is certainly linguistic, but it is also economic, sociopolitical, religious, biological, ecological, and geographical. For a conversation to have any function, let alone meaning, it must have a context that shapes the conversation’s incarnation and is in turn shaped by it.

Block’s definition, though very useful, must paradoxically be narrowed and expanded. Activist, writer, and farmer Wendell Berry defends just such a paradox. “By community,” he writes, “I mean the commonwealth and common interests, commonly understood, of people living together in a place and wishing to continue to do so. To put it another way, community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature” (1993, p. 119). With this definition he narrows Block’s designation by repeating the word local, claiming that community must be rooted, and expands it by introducing nature, recognizing that community is not restricted to human structures but incorporates the nonhuman as well: a community “is like an ecosystem, and it includes—or it makes itself harmoniously a part of—its local ecosystem” (ibid, p.155). In fact, Berry claims that if we are speaking of a healthy community then we must speak of more than humans, because we will be talking about a place and all its inhabitants: the neighborhood of humans and “its soil, its water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the nonhuman creatures that belong to it . . . All neighbors are included” (ibid, pp. 14, 15).

Block concurs, and beautifully articulates, that community is centrally about belonging (2009, p. xii), thus clarifying that it is relatedness to our neighbor, both human and nonhuman creatures, that determines how we act in the world. Community can then be understood as the interdependent relationship and mutual belonging between place, its inhabitants, and their stories. Clark believes that understanding and practicing this can help to restore the balance of traumatized brains, in which “the normal integration between motivational and cognitive regions of the brain” has been severely disrupted (Clark, 2002, p. 225). She argues that humans experience an overwhelming need to belong to some form of caring community (ibid, p. 228), which aids in restructuring the traumatized brain by “building an emotional bonding of trust” that is crucial for the body to heal itself (ibid, p. 225). Permaculture constructively envisions the practicality of this definition and how it correlates with nature, work, and healing.

Forgiveness and Life Together

2012-02-08T16:49:00.001-06:00

Forgiveness, like most concepts of any worth, is notoriously difficult to define. This is unavoidable, because such definitions must inevitably emerge from the ethos of specific times and locations in which that particular definition holds meaning. After all, the word ethos stems from the same root as ethic, both referring to character, custom, spirit, and habit. While I agree with Gayle Lenore Macnab’s statement that forgiveness is not easy or simple (53), it can at least suggest a certain rhythm because of cultivation within a community. Indeed, communities cannot survive without something like forgiveness, which is both biologically evolved and culturally refined. Perhaps forgiveness is necessary at times because some acts are so unspeakable, so unforgivable, that reparation for and sense of them can never be made. French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggested that maybe forgiveness, if it exists at all, exists only where there is the unforgivable; its possibility happens only in its impossibility. Certainly, people cannot and should not be demanded to forgive, but can we confess that the refusal to do so could produce slavery to the past that will project that fracture into the future? Forgiveness, as Macnab points out, reclaims life for the victim by leading to a path of “health and growth” (57).

Forgiveness, as Macnab rightly acknowledges, is not the longing for a different past, because “the past cannot be changed” (56). If the past could be changed, then there would be nothing to forgive, and if it could be forgotten than forgiveness would cease to exist (54). Forgiveness necessitates remembering. Like the cycle of seasons, forgiveness opens up a radical transformation of the past and a reinterpretation of time. Forgiveness is like a palimpsest: parchment on which ink has been erased to make room for something new even as the previous indentation remains. The past is not changed but re-formed, because forgiveness is going back to the future.

Macnab makes the important observation that forgiveness is not “[d]ependent on the offender’s request for forgiveness” (54), an observation which effectively reverses dominant societal logic. For many, forgiveness cannot happen unless the offender is repentant. Macnab challenges this logic, and in doing so allies herself with ancient wisdom such as the parable of the prodigal son. In that story, there is no reason to assume that the son is repentant when he decides to return home; his decision is due more to the fact that he is wallowing with the pigs. But his father, watching his son come down the road, does not know why he returns, only that he does return. The father runs out on the road and embraces his child, who now cries out that he is not worthy and should work in the fields to repay his debt. In this story, forgiveness creates repentance and the past can be transformed.

The Steps Toward Conflict Prevention Project (STEPS) is a remarkable program and an crucial conversation partner around justice and peacemaking. Marshall Wallace and his partners have recognized that communities have the unmatched potential to offer subversive alternatives to violence. Such examples are vital, life-giving, because they provide current manifestations of what resistance to violence and restoration of wholeness can look like.

Wallace notes the centrality of identity in the formation of such resistant and restorative communities (70). But identity is given an interesting and important twist: identity is often tied to ethnicity, but in STEPS cases identity is rooted in ethics (71). As mentioned in the previous reading response, ethics are closely related to ethos, which is the customs and habits and spirit of the community. In the STEPS cases, these ethics, or the ethos of the community, appear to be intentionally cultivated, which means to refine, inhabit, or till, like fertile topsoil which invites, indeed requires, future inputs and improvements. This intentionality consciously and critically joins the wisdom of the past with concrete practices in the present to address the potential of the future. The art of living together is required because radical acts such as compassion, forgiveness, hospitality, and love must be practiced with neighbors if they are ever to be offered to enemies. The alternative community from the Ghazni province in Afghanistan preserves and reinterprets local culture and tradition through music, education, and consensus-based decision-making (72) and inevitably poses a haunting question to current societies all over the world.

This question is also strikingly posed to peacebuilding practitioners. Often, it seems, peacebuilders want to address root causes but don’t want to put down roots. In my experience, peacebuilding activists frequently lack community like the ones mentioned by Wallace. A group of individuals committed to the same goal or having the same conversation does not constitute community: they share nothing but ideas, which can be fleeting. Healthy activists and movements seem to be grounded in a sustaining community with shared space, time, resources, memories, values, and practices. Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities, suggests that “To struggle for a cause it is best for people to be rooted in a community where they are learning reconciliation, acceptance of difference and of their own darkness, and how to celebrate . . . A community that does not celebrate is in danger of becoming just a group of people that get things done.” Activists can be so preoccupied with the future that they forget response-ability to the present moment. We need prophetic communities that microcosmically cultivate a restorative culture and imagine what the alternative future looks like right now. With models like the Ghazni province, the Muslim community in Rwanda, and the Colombian peace villages, that alternative future appears more tangible and more livable.

Agricultural Development: Bustan Qaraaqa

2011-12-09T08:11:00.002-06:00

Bustan Qaraaqa (Arabic for the Tortoise Garden; www.bustanqaraaqa.org) is a community permaculture farm located in the village of Beit Sahour, on the eastern edge of Bethlehem, Palestine. Established in 2008 by British ecologists and activists and local Palestinian partners, Bustan Qaraaqa is based in a one-hundred-year old stone house on fourteen dunums of land situated in Wadi Hanna Saad. The purpose of the farm is to catalyze a grassroots agroecological movement in the occupied Palestinian territories that responds to severe problems of food insecurity and ecosystem degradation. Such problems stem from humanitarian and environmental crises that are often instigated and exacerbated by the ongoing Israeli military occupation. Palestinians have endured extreme loss of land and lack of water access because of settlement construction and the establishment of the separation wall, which strengthens Israel’s monopolization of natural resources. Furthermore, the occupation has intensified soil and water pollution, habitat destruction, territorial fragmentation, movement restriction, and economic isolation. These effects aggravate population growth, species decline, desertification, and climate change.

In close collaboration with local neighbors, Bustan Qaraaqa serves as a model farm for experimentation and demonstration of permaculture designs and techniques for communal living through simple and inexpensive projects. The farm is also an education center that trains and assists local farmers throughout the region, as well as facilitating ecosystem restoration, species rehabilitation and conservation, food production for people in the midst of economic crises, and cultivating communal interdependence and pride as a form of resistance to military occupation. Ecological, economic, and social aspects are clearly embodied.

Permaculture is an important asset-based community and agricultural development strategy, because its methods “focus on the opportunities rather than the obstacles” (Holmgren, 2004, p. 4). Rooted in “ecological science and systems theory” (ibid, p. 4) as well as community research, religious traditions, and native cultures of place (ibid, p. 6), permaculture stems from three interrelated ethical maxims: “Care for the earth (husband soil, forests and water)”; “Care for people (look after self, kin and community)”; and “Fair share (set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus)” (ibid, p. 6). Furthermore, the word permaculture not only means permanent and sustainable agriculture but also permanent and sustainable culture (ibid, p. 1).

Bustan Qaraaqa’s permaculture projects reverse deforestation, enliven degraded soils, nurture biodiversity, collect and reuse water, and minimize negative consequences of human footprints on the earth by composting waste, recycling old material, and efficient design. The farm’s current projects include a tree nursery, water conservation and reuse, green building, and fish farming.

The free tree nursery harbors native and adapted plants in order to ameliorate environmental degradation through re-habitation and reforestation. Making adapted and native trees, some of which had gone extinct in the region, available to local communities is a vital step to reforesting the region into an edible landscape. The nursery contains over fifty species that provide food, fuel, building materials, soil restoration and remediation, landscaping, ecosystems restoration, and resistance to land confiscation. Bustan Qaraaqa’s workers have widespread experience in agroforestry projects.

Water conservation and reuse is another major project. Water shortage and lack of access is a rampant problem in the Palestinian territories. Israeli settlements consume twice the amount of water that Palestinian communities consume (Palestine monitor, 2009, p. 46); the World Health Organization states that a decent standard of living implies 100 liters per person each day, while the average West Bank Palestinian barely drinks 70. Israel also controls 80% of the West Bank’s depleting groundwater sources and the Jordan River, which is channeled to taps in Tel Aviv and farms in the Negev; such diversion has severely diminished the ancient waterway and has made essential aquifers extremely vulnerable to salinization and raw sewage (Faris, 2011). Over 200,000 people in rural villages are disconnected from the water network, and those who are connected rarely receive an uninterrupted supply due to military stoppages and rerouted pipes. The situation may worsen in light of climate change and population growth. Bustan Qaraaqa develops rainwater harvesting systems for rooftop and road runoff, which is stored in cisterns and tanks for household and irrigation use. Additionally, the farm utilizes swales (ditches dug along the contour of a slope) to retain water, build up soil, and prevent erosion. Bustan Qaraaqa also practices and demonstrates water conservation and recycling with a humanure toilet (which is also a form of waste management) and an elaborate graywater reuse system.

The farm’s green building program includes rainwater catchment, humanure toilet, showers, kitchen, and a greenhouse. The greenhouse embodies four design principles, each achieved through a variety of methods: reduced material consumption (multifunctional architecture, using salvaged materials, and using local materials for eco-construction); water conservation (rainwater harvesting and storage, water recycling, and graywater biofiltration); climate improvement (carbon-neutral winter heating, solar passive winter warming, and efficient design for summer cooling); and food production (winter fruits and vegetables, summer fruits and vegetables such as tropical crops, and an aquaponics system).

The aquaponics system, which is the first one in the West Bank, is also part of Bustan Qaraaqa’s fish farming project. The project was pioneered by the BySpokes crew (www.byspokes.org) and has been replicated in numerous urban and rural sites in Beit Sahour and the Jordan River Valley. The aquaponics system uses cheap and locally-available (mostly reclaimed) material and effectively works with the high alkalinity of the West Bank’s groundwater. This system grows plants that require copious amounts of water even during the long dry season, and is capable of growing locally-adapted and exotic plants.

Permaculture projects like Bustan Qaraaqa are extremely transferable. Even though permaculture, as a form of agroecology, is highly contextual, the principles and design methods are applicable in any setting. Permaculture’s co-originator David Holmgren’s twelve principles testifies are: observe and interact; catch and use energy; self-regulate and accept feedback; use and value renewable resources and services; produce no waste; design from patterns to details; integrate rather than segregate; use small and slow solutions; use and value diversity; use edges and value the marginal; and creatively use and respond to change (2004, p. 7-18). Permaculture started in Australia and has been used in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. With Bustan Qaraaqa as an example, permaculture design and development simultaneously addresses scientific, economic, and social factors.

References

Faris, S. (2011). Holy water: A precious commodity in a region of conflict. Retrieved October 29, 2011, from Orion Magazine.
site: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6473

Holmgren, D. (2004). Essence of permaculture. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from Holmgren
Design Services Website.
site: http://www.holmgren.com.au/

Palestine monitor 2009 factbook. (2009). Ramallah: Palestine Monitor & HDIP.

Intervention Reflection

2011-12-06T19:06:00.002-06:00

Interventions, whether developmental or medical, are often presented in militaristic language, in which a foreign third-party forcefully enters the scene to right a wrong. Even when the intentions are supposedly peaceful, this framework only exacerbates the pre-existing conflict. However, some version of intervention is sometimes necessary, and is much more effective when conducted by those familiar with the context of conflict, which necessitates time and proximity. Professionalizing intervention would seem to foster neither, because it more rigidly establishes the role of the intervener as an outsider, and usually a transient one at that. Certainly outsiders can and do play a vital role, but outsiders must be intimate with a place in order to intervene respectfully and appropriately, and foreign specialization does not often encourage either one.

A classmate and I had a fascinating conversation regarding John Paul Lederach’s intervention in the Oka crisis. This case study provided fertile space in which to discuss and wrestle with the ethics of intervention. My friend wondered if Lederach’s decision to refuse participation in strategies of violence was an ethical decision, because he believes Lederach is not a stakeholder in this situation and, as a privileged outsider, should present a diversity of tactics to his clients. My friend is wary of solely ideological assumptions of violence and peace which do not attempt to understand their contextual emergence. I am sympathetic to this suspicion, and I agree that Lederach is definitely not a major stakeholder like the First Nation groups are: Lederach’s life is not woven into the texture of those events and thus has the ability to leave at any moment. However, I also think that once Lederach ruptures the sphere of influence by arriving in that place, he cannot now pretend like he is disinterested. His introduction into the ecosystem of conflict not only changes his organismal interactions within it, but his introduction also transforms the ecosystem itself; in this way, he has a stake simply because he is now present. Once we know and have witnessed we are called by the event to respond, whether in action or feigned ignorance.

I understand the point my friend made about presenting a diversity of tactics. However, I think Lederach did allow this to happen in a way. He did not encourage the First Nation groups to give up violent resistance, instead simply opting not to assist in strategizing. This is a valid decision considering his skillset, which does not include strategic planning for violent revolution. Furthermore, polite silence is not the same thing as solidarity; I’m not convinced by imperialistic intervention or by sterile objectivity. Allies should be able to offer insights, advice, and experience, which are all embedded in valuations of the world. Ultimately, the intervener should leave the final decision to the people whose lives are irrevocably intertwined in the context, even if the intervener disagrees with the ultimate decision. But the intervener, as an ally, also has the responsibility to voice concern and to make suggestions. Could Lederach have participated in strategizing for violent resistance by assuming an advocacy role for nonviolent direct action? My friend’s important concern is that renouncing violent revolution often leads to denouncing any form of revolution, effectively shutting the door on both. In the Oka crisis, the First Nation groups’ desire was reclamation of ancestral land, while the government’s only purpose was to dissolve tension. In a way, by not strategizing perhaps Lederach subsidized the government’s aims by ending the confrontation: the government’s goals were met while the First Nation groups were silenced. At this point, he could have played the role of both activist and translator-guide (process design and facilitation).

I empathize with some violent liberation movements, including the second Palestinian intifada. First World activists and peacebuilders run the risk of looking down our condescending noses at the actions of the oppressed without ethnographic studies of what caused such actions. However, phenomenologically, militarized strategies of liberation almost always reproduce the cycle which they sought to overthrow, because they are dependent on the same worldviewing and the same resources (eg. international arms trade) in order to resist empire. The result is more deaths and another repressive regime. As black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde said, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine transformation” (Lorde & Clarke, 2007, p. 112-3). For instance, the first Palestinian intifada was predominantly a concerted and mobilized nonviolent revolution, and it paved the way for the Oslo Peace Accords. However, in the aftermath of Oslo’s failure, the second violent intifada began in which suicide bombings drastically increased. Now, the situation on the ground is far worse than it was ten years ago with a massive concrete wall, intensified movement restrictions, and accelerated settlement construction. Because of this, I think the ends and the means must be as commensurate as possible.

Speakin of which, are the roles of activist and carrier-catalyst incommensurate? For instance, could Lederach have negotiated with the government while also siding himself with the First Nation groups? As an intervener, I should not allocate legitimacy completely to one side. I do allocate legitimacy in some instances more to one side than the other, but sole legitimacy would blind me to the suffering and experience of the other, thus reproducing a cycle of violence. By taking sides without allocating sole legitimacy, Lederach could have still functioned as a carrier-catalyst (negotiation) and a bridge builder (trust building) in order to understand what the government was and was not willing to concede to the First Nation groups. As a conduit (active listening and deep communication), Lederach would also have filled the role of the seer (conflict analysis and diagnosis) for the First Nation groups by explaining how far the government would go. The resistance groups could then have made their decision how to respond. If the government’s main aim was to dissolve tension with no intention of compromising, such information would be vital to the strategies of the First Nation groups. As a carrier-catalyst and conduit, Lederach could have then communicated clearly to the government how far the First Nation groups were willing to go in response. As an outsider with such potential connections, Lederach could have enacted multiple parts. The insights gained from these connections could be relayed to the side which the intervener has taken, thus strengthening their position and possible responses.

In such a situation, however, peacebuilders must guard against thinking they can become completely one with the oppressed. There may be some exceptions to this rule, because conversion can happen even while we recognize irreducible differences. In my experience, I have seen “the oppressed” welcome the outsider into their own midst as one of them, as an “other” who is now part of them. Lederach did not have enough time to do so in this situation, which could be part of the problem. As the situation stood, Lederach seemed to have two choices: either represent the First Nations or access them to government. I think some situations could arise in which the first choice is the more appropriate, but in this particular situation Lederach’s mission might have been more successful if he more proactively attempted to connect the First Nation groups to the powers that be so that their legitimate demands could be heard. The government’s willingness (or lack thereof) to cooperate could have been articulated to the First Nation groups; as a conduit and a carrier-catalyst, Lederach could have filled this vital niche. As a seer, I think it would have been appropriate for him to predict what might occur if the current violent resistance escalated, especially considering the superior force and resources of the government.

If presented with a similar scenario, I don’t know what decisions I would have made. My experiences in nonviolent intervention were ad hoc, rooted in the crisis of the moment and the obligation to respond. We had no time to plan or to train, and the important roles of conflict intervention were messily inhabited as we broke bread around a table under the specter of military night raids. At times, this is the only possible response: the willingness to place our political bodies in the midst of the body politic.

References

Lorde, A. & Clarke, C (ed.). (2007). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press.

Mediation Reflection

2011-11-29T10:28:00.002-06:00

The practice of mediation is considered one of the central tools for peacebuilders. Mediation, along with negotiation and facilitation, form the backbone of CJP’s conflict transformation ethos, due in part to the plethora of faculty members who have been involved with the Mennonite Central Committee. But mediation, like negotiation, is also a common skill, albeit an unrefined one; as James Joyce would have it, mediation is a chaosmos, an order which is unsettled by the disorder it seeks to direct. We often facilitate conflict between family members or friends, acting as middlemen (or women) relaying messages and summarizing underlying needs. The trick is to unearth this unrecognized daily practice and recognize its distinctive methods. Mediation is the structured emergence of difference that creates space for potential convergence.

Unfortunately, I have been somewhat skeptical of mediation. I never doubted the vital importance of it in certain circumstances but I wondered how applicable it was in many situations, especially when it became extremely specialized and professionalized. In my limited view, mediators whitewashed severe inequities and power imbalances by claiming neutrality, leading some to boast they could mediate anything, presumably even racial or economic conflicts. Major nations send mediators like George Mitchell to facilitate the (laughably named) Middle East peace process, who inevitably fail because they enter assuming, or pretending, that two equal parties sit at the table. And when Palestinians refuse to concede on certain issues, the mediators complain that they aren’t giving up enough ground. But how do you give ground when you don’t have much to give? How do you give ground when you believe that most of your ground was taken by the party with whom you’re supposed to be negotiating?

I worked with a reconciliation group based in Jerusalem. Musalaha does important work, including mediation work. In the vein of narrative mediation, Musalaha recognizes the vitality of storytelling in which an encounter with the other is unavoidable. That important work, however, is endlessly challenging and frustrating because they are handcuffed by a desire to appease exceedingly conflicting groups. In the midst of my frustration I recognized that Musalaha attempts to walk a string-thin line. They are in an extremely volatile situation as a non-profit organization funded mostly by Evangelical Christians, many of whom still ardently sympathize with Israel but also want to help “Arab Christians.” The director, an Israeli Palestinian, says he has “an itch for justice” and is ready for Musalaha to speak more boldly. But if Palestinian participants cry justice for their beloved country too loudly, most Israelis won’t come. However, if Musalaha continues a more neutral stance on political issues, Palestinians will consider that stance as normalizing the occupation and they may not come much longer either. In this case, the process of mediation transforms some individual lives, which cannot be underestimated, but those individual lives return to extreme societal and structural disparities separated by a dividing wall of hostility and concrete.

During this time, once or twice a week several friends of mine and I slept in the home of a nonviolent protest leader outside of Bethlehem because of the regular occurrence of IDF night raids. Apparently, they came to the village regularly, and came while we slept there but never came to the house. Not until we missed a night. Our friend was later taken into a back room at a checkpoint crossing and was beaten for ten or fifteen minutes before being released. Israeli soldiers had the protest leader’s cellphone number, calling him regularly to request visits in his front yard to work things out over tea. The protest leader said that by inviting them for tea he would be accepting the present power inequality in which they could come at will and armed to his home. When the wall fell and the occupation ended, then he would invite them.

Coworkers in the reconciliation group were skeptical of my involvement with nonviolent intervention, direct action, and journalistic advocacy. An activist friend angrily reprimanded me for working with a reconciliation group, all of which she claimed hide behind neutrality and historical amnesia; this friend reprimanded me for this as we drove out to the village to sleep in the protest leader’s home. These experiences, as well as daily crossing through the checkpoints in the separation wall, convinced me that direct action and mediation are both needed. But they manifest themselves in different contexts in which one practice may be inappropriate. Activists sometimes forget that conversation is a desired result of direct action; the table is made more accessible for all. Mediators sometimes forget that makers of peace must often be disturbers of peace. Governments idolize King and Gandhi now that they are dead, but they were vilified as troublemakers and verbally and physically attacked when alive. Mediation has an important place, but cannot be the only core of peacebuilding. It is a backup when negotiation fails because of entrenched ideologies, and nonviolent direct action replaces failed mediation processes. Both channel energy and turn up unheard voices. As Ched Myers and Elaine Enns have said, the two are estranged relatives.

I took my role as a mediator seriously during role-playing sessions and I tried to practice the discussed skills. I have acted as a sort of mediator for friends in dispute, but surveying the field provided a more stable framework in which to work. Part of the beauty of mediation is the interpretability of methods that allows for diverse engagement with the process, whether that is traditional, transformative, narrative, victim-offender, or community mediation. The word chaosmos came to mind several times during the process of mediating and being mediated: a mediator must extensively plan and organize, but must also be open to the unpredictability of human encounter. The mediation process may shed light on unexpected emotions and details that could never have been predicted, even in a role-play situation. This highlighted the fact that mediators do not control the process but instead facilitate it, direct it. In a way, mediators conduct the flux toward an acceptable rhythm. One observer commented that mediators play the role of encourager by soliciting generative ideas from participants. The ownership belongs to the participants and the mediator, in a way, plays stupid so that participants are forced to constantly reshape and reform experiences and emotions. Instead of being the all-knowing third party, the mediator elicits different aspects of repeated stories by assuming ignorance. This forces the participants to continually clarify desires and perspectives. And, unlike negotiation, a third party is able to rephrase previously entrenched views that might make listening and understanding more possible.

My valuation of mediation rose during the class role-playing sessions. I hope to complete the required hours at the Fairfield Center and explore community and narrative mediation in more depth. Conflict will inevitably arise and the skill to stimulate discussion, facilitate listening, and to construct more collaborative environments is critical. And to do all of this without controlling and manipulating the process or the people involved. Mediation is the art of asking the right questions and the art of shared storytelling. In many ways, these are lost arts that must be restored.

Cosmopolitanism and Bioregionalism: Reflection on Contemporary Conflict Resolution

2011-11-14T11:40:00.002-06:00

Hugh Miall, Oliver Ramsbotham, and Tom Woodhouse have produced a remarkable and thorough resource for reflective practitioners. Contemporary Conflict Resolution is an ambitious attempt to explore the history, practices, and critiques of the field. I felt compelled to read beyond the assigned chapters because of the multiplicity of important topics. Indeed, the volume is so broad and expansive that the task of reflecting on it is extremely daunting. Too many possible trails diverge in this dense wood.

Cosmopolitan conflict resolution is the central theme of the massive book (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 265), the deepest level of which is conflict transformation (ibid, pp. 31-32). This well-articulated approach is based on cooperation (ibid, p. 20). However, the current global economic and political structures engender extreme competition, centralization, and stratification. Interestingly, the authors adamantly praise the United Nations as the pinnacle of cosmopolitan conflict resolution (ibid, pp. 273-4), which depends on the aforementioned structures (ibid, p. 272). The authors defend the United Nations from detractors throughout the book (ibid, p. 291), which is indeed admirable and appropriate at times. But they do so by propagating global citizenship in a world community (ibid, p. 396). This appears reasonable, but becomes problematic when cosmopolitanism remains comfortable with mere reform of the state system (ibid, p. 399).

Reform is certainly not a four-letter word, and is absolutely necessary at times, but many historians claim that state-making has served, not to protect people from violence as Hobbes would contend (ibid, pp. 95-96), but to organize for the purpose of war (Alexis-Baker, 2011). Rather than paving the way for the world community, nation-states disintegrated communities (ibid). Indeed, European peasants staged major rebellions, causing some of the most tumultuous periods in European history (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 275), during the infancy of the nation-state when leaders introduced uniform language and currency over huge territories (Alexis-Baker, 2011).

The Occupy Wall Street movement is resisting similar trends within liberal democracy, in effect agreeing with the authors’ critique of the internal democratic peace theory (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 280). Liberal democracies bifurcated the political and economic systems, in which the supposed equality of the former actually supports structural inequality in the latter (Myers, 1994, p. 294). Many Americans, even poor Americans, seem to have accepted this division and forfeited economic or political transformation because Horatio Algers’ bootstrap tales are still so prevalent.

The authors of this textbook have internalized another tale which believes that international law and human rights can be normalized in a convergence of state interests that will ultimately transform the current systems (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 280). This strikes me as “an admittedly overoptimistic ‘long history of the state’ in terms of the development of international norms” (ibid, p. 275) and an extremely positivist view of historical progress (ibid, p. 267, 269), a view which has caused inestimable violence to the indigenous people of the West, to non-Westerners, and to women of all races (Caputo, 2006, p. 38). The UN did not prevent the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor have they ever effectively constrained Israel, who easily ignores UN resolutions without any fear of repercussion. Israel is an example of a rejection of the liberal cosmopolitan values and principles which the authors religiously endorse (ibid, p. 411), but the authors main example of rejection is Wahhabist Muslims who cannot accept liberal democracy because majority opinion might outvote the will of Allah (ibid, p. 411). The authors fear this rejection of cosmopolitanism, but is it fundamentally different from Israel’s stance or even from American conscientious objectors? Even if the majority votes for war, which they do through tax dollars and presidential votes, conscientious objectors reject majority opinion within a liberal democracy. The authors’ viewpoint thus orients them back to military force in order to impose liberal democratic cosmopolitan values (ibid, p. 327), even though just war criteria have never prevented any war. Is the role of the peacebuilder ultimately to control the flow of history? Could there be a difference between controlling and leavening?

Liberal human rights and international law are incredibly important references and tools, but they often seem shallow when compared to deep cultural reservoirs of human folly and wisdom (discussed in chapter fifteen). Certainly these reservoirs can be dangerous because of their endless interpretability. However, this is no less the case for the text of human rights, whose staunchest advocates think such rights are universal. But nothing cultural is really universal, which is why people spend so much time arguing for human rights, or rather evangelizing for them. I am not necessarily against ‘evangelism’ for justice and peacemaking, but I tend to think that interpretability is what gives texts their life, and I tend to think that universality emerges from the plurality of particularity, not from an indistinct uniformity. Part of the irony is that many peacebuilders insist on abstract formulations like “the family of nations” or “the world community” (ibid, p. 266, 396) and then also posit human rights as the basis for all relationships. But healthy families and communities are not centered on rights; they are centered on responsibility to other members. In a way, solely rights-based approaches can devalue communal interdependence by operating on individualistic assumptions: instead of active and responsible participation, we get de-personalized laws of non-infringement. Some have argued that such laws were actually designed to dismantle social groups into more manageable individuals (Alexis-Baker, 2011). Again, I am certainly not rejecting the significant tool of human rights, and they may be transitionally necessary in a world of global economics and nation-states. But I am suggesting that they may not be all-sufficient. In the end, stories are all we have.

No system will ever be perfect, but are we able to even imagine alternatives such as bioregionalism? Bioregionalism is a political, economic, and cultural way of life defined by ecological boundaries such as watersheds and soil types, rather than arbitrary state lines. We are members of specific communities within specific ecosystems, not of some amorphous world community. However, these specific communities are irrevocably connected to other specific communities and require participation and cooperation and therefore preventing devolution into tiny isolate enclaves. Bioregionalism thus takes very seriously “post-structural concerns for local participation and human diversity” (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 267).

What might a cosmopolitan bioregionalism look like? The textbook authors are rightly committed to pluralism (ibid, p. 396-399), but for some reason think that global governance can deliver locally defined welfare for the most marginalized (ibid, p. 397). While perhaps possible, the authors don’t adequately explain how global governance, presumably under UN administration, would prevent homogenization and “top-down forces of militarist, market-driven, materialist globalization” (ibid, p. 398). The earth itself is capable of cultivating pluralism, witnessed in natural biodiversity, but it is also able to limit and ground it (Myers, 1994, p. 364). Theoretically, placing economics under the control of bioregional knowledge would foster cooperation because everyone would be dependent on resource stewardship of that place; however, abolishing centralized authority (whether the nation-state government or the UN), does not automatically instigate inter-regional warfare over territory. The textbook authors note that real commons did not predominantly end in tragedy because people mostly cooperated by regulating competition and restricting freedom (Ramsbotham, 2011, pp. 294-295). Bioregional governance requires a networked confederation of local groups to plan, cooperate, trade, mediate, and share knowledge (Myers, 1994, p. 366).

Bioregionalism is one imaginable alternative that can even be planted within the shell of existing structures. The chapter on environmental conflict resolution (Ramsbotham, 2011, pp. 293-304) introduces extremely important issues such as climate change, peak oil, resource competition, and the survival of the marginalized (ibid, p. 293). The authors relate important examples such as a Californian water conflict (ibid, p. 295), but they would have benefited significantly from discussing the potential of permaculture as a form of peacebuilding. Rooted in ecological science and systems theory (Holmgren, 2004, p. 4) as well as community research, religious traditions, and native cultures of place (ibid, p. 6), permaculture is a form of land and cultural design and management that stems from three interrelated ethical maxims: “Care for the earth (husband soil, forests and water)”; “Care for people (look after self, kin and community)”; and “Fair share (set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus)” (ibid, p. 6). Furthermore, the word permaculture not only means permanent and sustainable agriculture but also permanent and sustainable culture (ibid, p. 1). A brief example is Bustan Qaraaqa, a community permaculture farm located in Beit Sahour, a village close to Bethlehem, Palestine. The farm addresses food insecurity and environmental degradation that result from infrastructural instability and a military occupation. Through education and demonstration, the farm models cheap and easy ways to live sustainably and produce food such as water conservation, aquaponics systems, tree planting, and will soon include waste management and fish farming.

On a final note, the authors could have strengthened their helpful survey (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 294) by mentioning Cuba. The Caribbean country plummeted into economic crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union (Rosset & Bourque, 2005, p. 363). Fossil fuel availability drastically decreased, as well as food imports which dropped by more than fifty percent; Cuban agriculture lost seventy percent of available fertilizers and pesticides (ibid, p. 364). Daily caloric intake in the early 1990s dropped by thirty percent from the 1980s (ibid, p. 364). Remarkably, Cuba survived and thrived in the aftermath of their initial catastrophe by employing alternative technologies, returning to animal instead of mechanical traction, remembering older techniques (such as intercropping, crop rotations, and composting), and supplementing limited synthetic fertilizers with agroecological practices such as biopesticides and biofertilizers, natural enemies, earthworms, green manures and cover crops, and integration of grazing animals (ibid, p. 364).

The government simultaneously converted almost all state farms into worker-owned cooperatives, acknowledging that farm managers’ must be “intimately familiar with the ecological heterogeneity” of the land (ibid, p. 365). Individual farms (ibid, p. 364) and these worker-owned cooperatives represent a fascinating synthesis of capitalism and socialism. Urban farming played a central role in overcoming food insecurity (ibid, pp. 365-366), flipping conventional wisdom on its back by proving that small countries can feed themselves, even without copious synthetic fertilizers and corporate-scale farms (ibid, p. 366). Cuban practices such as agroecology, fair prices, land redistribution, local production, and urban farming are very applicable elsewhere (ibid, p. 367). Cuba emerges as a key example of an alternative paradigm that addresses extreme environmental and social challenges (Ramsbotham, 2011, p. 293) and is a paradigm, along with bioregionalism, that has definite resonances with the important insights of cosmopolitan conflict resolution (ibid, p. 32).

References

Alexis-Baker, A. (2011). The myth of state as savior and elections as a confession of faith. Retrieved November 9, 2011, from Jesus Radicals.
site: http://www.jesusradicals.com/the-myth-of-the-state-as-savior-and-elections-as-confession-of-faith/

Caputo, J. (2006). Philosophy and theology. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Holmgren, D. (2004). Essence of permaculture. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from Holmgren
Design Services Website: http://www.holmgren.com.au/

Myers. C. (1994). Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world christians. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Ramsbotham, O., Woodhouse, T., and Miall, H. (2011). Contemporary conflict resolution (3rd ed.). Malden: Polity Press.

Rosset, P, & Bourque, M. (2005). Lessons of Cuban resistance. In J. Pretty (ed.), The Earthscan reader in sustainable agriculture (pp. 362-367). Sterling: Earthscan.

The Nature of Science in Sustainable Agriculture

2011-10-24T10:59:00.002-05:00

Science inhabits an important niche in sustainable agriculture. This niche functions in several related ways.

Firstly, science produces measurements and provides demonstration. We may observe that carrots and tomatoes, squash and corn, lettuce and walnut husks, grow better together, or that polyculture is more productive than monoculture, but a scientific approach quantifies the increase in yield and the benefit to the system as a whole. In this way, science conducts tests in the particularity of each agroecosystem.

Secondly, science can offer credibility and argumentation. Many in Western societies, from skeptics to the disinterested, will more likely believe statistical analysis of a formal experiment than cultural tradition or experiential observation. By offering tested data, science serves to convince a public predisposed to quantification by illuminating the credibility of sustainable agriculture. Furthermore, accepted mainstream science has endorsed the agricultural status quo, so one role of science in sustainable agriculture is argumentation in the arena of hypotheses. Also, case studies from other countries in which sustainable practices have been employed for centuries are given credibility by measurements and demonstrations.

Thirdly, science deepens understandings and of ecological rhythms which sustainable agriculture strives to imitate. In this way, different fields of science establish a mosaic of knowledge which undergirds sustainable agricultural practices. Rather than preoccupation with universality, this deepened understanding focuses on the local context, therefore encouraging participation in bioregional processes. Science therefore enables the farmer to partner with the natural processes of a certain place in order to maximize yield and to preserve the place’s health into the foreseeable future.

As such, sustainable farmers practice numerous kinds of science, including (among many others) ecology, agronomy, biology, climatology, physiology, hydrology, and even nutrition. Extensive training in all these fields is not required for a farmer to be sustainable, but aspects and insights from each will be present in the work itself. Also, sustainable farmers will literally be involved in field work as opposed to laboratories and test-tube experiments: their work will be exposed to and incorporate natural disturbances. Because of this, sustainable farmers will not employ some universal step-by-step scientific method because each agroecosystem is distinct and requires intentional and contextual interaction that cannot be achieved through prepackaged methodologies. However, farmers will utilize different scientific methods depending on their context, even depending on different locations within their farms. An assortment of methods will emerge based on the needs and the gifts of the particular place. Observation and context are pivotal in scientific methods.

These methods of science in sustainable agriculture will be the same as the nature of science. Agricultural science will be empirical, based on observations of and experiences in the ecosystems on the farm and the ecosystems in which the farm is located. It will be inferential, which means it will make claims about those observations. For instance, a farmer may observe that certain crops are no longer wilted and may then infer that this is due to efficient distribution of rainwater collection or to the addition of mulching that retains moisture content in the topsoil. Agricultural science will also be theory-laden; nothing occurs in a vacuum and so farmers will be biased by values and training. A farmer with an agronomic background may posit everything as a soil management problem, while a farmer with education in physiology may first look to the individual plant as the most important factor. Because this is inevitable (and not altogether bad), diversifying the disciplines by recognizing their interdependence becomes vital. Additionally, agricultural will be socially and culturally conditioned. All scientists are partially determined by the values, practices, and perceptions of their own culture. Agricultural scientists will grow certain types of crops, employ certain types of technology, conduct certain types of experiments, and respond with certain types of native techniques depending on their culture’s standards and ethics. In another way, sustainable agricultural science will be socially bound by recognizing its connection to other social practices such as economics, politics, and religion. Agricultural science will also be socially and culturally conditioned because it will take seriously the health of human and nonhuman communities in that place, as well as learning from the folly and wisdom embedded in cultural traditions.

And agricultural science will be tentative and therefore subject to evolution. Ecosystems exhibit a dynamic equilibrium and so agricultural science must embrace and adapt to that dynamism. Agricultural science will also be tentative because it will be open to knowledge from the plurality of other places in the world.

The Body Politic: Gilligan's Preventing Violence

2011-10-21T08:49:00.002-05:00

Most of my classmates cannot stop singing praises about James Gilligan’s Preventing Violence. To a large extent, I can relate. Gilligan’s exposition on the multi-determined nature of violence (Gilligan, 2001, p. 67) is captivating and compelling. Many of his conclusions in some way support my convictions of community, nonviolence, the convergence of interpersonal and structural transformation, and the inherent structural problems of our collective house. He puts the future as starkly as did MLK: either we learn to live, and want to live, together or we die (p. 9). I also related to Gilligan’s doubt: he makes clear that he is not at all optimistic that the United States will heed his theory and generate the political and economic will to restructure our lives (p. 26); charting out a course to prevent violence does not mean we will set sail. I do not feel much optimism or idealism at all anymore, but I cannot shake deep convictions and, in some ways, a sense of obligation. Now that I have seen and encountered, I cannot ignore.

Gilligan’s public health approach (p. 12) is tremendously helpful, attempting to explicate causes and responses from a phenomenological perspective rather than a strictly a priori theoretical basis. Because he recognizes the biological, psychological, and social determinants of violence, he also acknowledges different levels of prevention (p. 20), which correspond with John Paul Lederach’s levels of intervention in Building Peace. Both Lederach and Gilligan accept the necessity of a diversity of gifts and a multiplicity of engagement aimed at diving as deep as possible. Like Hercules fighting the Hydra monster, we can chop down destructive systems forever, but they will continually grow back like biting heads unless we tend to the root. In this etymological sense, Gilligan’s diagnosis and prognosis is subversively radical. Furthermore, he won me over with his strong references to literature, such as Woolf, Shakespeare, and Genesis (p. 57, 8). More peacebuilders must begin to take these deep reservoirs of human folly and wisdom much more seriously. Such cultural traditions, like the social sciences, are extremely important disciplines that we cannot ignore.

Upon critical reflection, I have my share of questions with some of Gilligan’s points and assumptions. Gilligan’s impressive theory is that violence revolves around shame (p. 29) and that the purpose of violence is to coerce respect from others (p. 35). I put on Gilligan’s glasses and was amazed to see how many acts of violence could indeed be traced to shame and the desire for respect. Even playful insults often result in a jocular retaliatory punch in order to save face. While extraordinarily insightful, Gilligan’s theory stems from studies limited to U.S. prisons, which are situated in a Western society. I wonder if his theory can be translated into every culture and every violent situation. For instance, I see a strong correlation between this theory and Israel/Palestine and the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but how does shame-based violence relate to U.S. incursions into Latin America, or funding rebel groups in Mozambique, or the first Gulf War? The danger of a fantastic theory is that it can become just another universal language, another meta-narrative. Interestingly, Gilligan critiques just such a tendency in the medieval concept of evil, which people viewed as an objective reality with an existence independent of subjective experience (p. 14). I think Gilligan has almost replaced “evil” with “shame.” He does not apply shame in the same way he claims medievalists did evil, but he seems to view it as the objective reality which lurks beneath every act of violence. I am hesitant to make such a statement, as possible as it may be.

Gilligan’s phrase “traditional moral and legal approach” (p. 7) is misleading. His prevailing argument is against the contemporary industrial criminal justice system, an argument with which I agree. But that system is not traditional. If, by traditional, he means “what we’ve had for awhile,” such explicitness would be understood and welcome, because equating this present system with the past four thousand years seems untenable. Indeed, he actually notes restorative justice as an alternative (p. 8), which is often inspired by ancient traditional practices, whether from Native Americans, Maoris, or Palestinian Jews.

While I also have problems with moralistic language, Gilligan’s definition of morality is overly negative (p. 18). He seems to think that empiricism is the right framework (p. 12) because it is somehow objective, which means divorced from morality. But observation does not occur without some value-claims. The binary opposition between morality and empiricism is somewhat unhelpful, and it is not necessarily true: our values shape our perceptions and perceptions shape our values. This is an inevitable cycle of mutualism that seems better to embrace than ignore, especially since Gilligan’s training as a psychiatrist illuminates his predisposition to a public health approach (p. 12). As I suggested earlier, his phenomenological lens, which utilizes the social sciences and recognizes “real consequences for real people” (p. 13), is important and resonates very deeply with me, but this is not a separate endeavor from philosophizing. Social sciences can be just as abstract as some philosophy; they contribute an essential voice, but if we take seriously our personal and societal biases we will not claim that they unveil the real perspective. Pitting empiricism against morality implicitly states that we can completely free ourselves from interpretive lenses and see things as they really are. While we cannot and should not reject phenomenology (something which I hold dear), we can and should accept our contingencies and the values that leaven our observations.

Gilligan offers a valid observation of militarism by sardonically suggesting that one murder leads to prison while thousands of murders earn the office of president or the emperor’s crown (p. 59); the highest honor given in the United States is the Congressional Medal of Honor, which is awarded to men for doing violence, for turning themselves and other men into objects of each other’s violence (p. 59). Gilligan in effect blunts this incisive critique by reframing military violence as necessary sacrifice for the sake of comrades and for the sake of all of us (p. 59). Gilligan therefore ends up supporting what he just exposed. Gilligan is very critical about the structural violence of American society, but he retreats from fully applying that critique to a major manifestation of socially-accepted, and socially-endorsed, violence. I am not at all interested in demonization, but if preventing violence is a prerequisite for human survival (p. 26), then militarism cannot be easily excused from the table. Intellectual honesty might require that people’s toes get stepped on at times.

I respectfully step on Gilligan’s toes when he addresses technology and economics. He actually makes an anarcho-primitivist critique when he claims that our hierarchical division of society did not exist before the dawn of the civilization (p. 104) in hunter-gatherer societies (p. 89). Indeed, one could argue that communities like the Hutterites (p. 86) and the kibbutzim (p. 87), examples of ways to create less violent societies, attempt to re-imagine a Paleolithic ethos in the modern world. Gilligan believes, however, that civilization no longer requires stratifications, such as slavery, because of progress (p. 104). Apparently, Gilligan thinks progress replaces human manual labor with robots so that we are free to engage in more productive endeavors (p. 105). I do think appropriate technologies have an important role, and I absolutely agree that we do not need economic stratifications, but I question that this will be achieved by producing more technology that eradicates human engagement. Gilligan’s faith in technological progression seems intimately tied to forms of violence: utter reliance on nonrenewable fossil fuels and the violence to the earth and its human and nonhuman communities.

Perhaps this exposes another component of violence: the devaluation of the body and the alienation of work. I don’t think Europeans enslaved Africans because they were black; they enslaved Africans because Africans were economically expedient and militarily unimposing. They could be forced to do the work that Europeans did not want to do and racism justified everything. Replacing slaves with technology will not guarantee the end of resource wars, much less the end of violence. I don’t know exactly in what direction we should move, but I think ancient cultural wisdom might at least provide one interpretation of ways forward. The early monastic communities believed, as Gilligan seems to note, that the project of civilization is constructed on the centralization of exploitation and wealth; if that is the case, then communities should become as self-sufficient as possible (Myers, 1994, p. 182). Furthermore, they claimed that exploitation and wealth stratification stem from the alienation of human labor, which I think relate to a devaluation of the body; in order to restore dignity and respect (as opposed to humiliation and shame), they centered their communal lives around shared manual, and therefore unalienated, work (p. 182). Critical questions can be asked here, but I wonder if the dualism between body and soul plays a larger role in violence than is often credited. If it does, reclaiming the tangibility and localness of the body, and therefore the body’s interdependence with other bodies, is a way of preventing violence in an increasingly virtual age. Nonviolence is a part of this reclamation, because engaged nonviolence affirms the actual embodiment of humanity, recognizing the strategic and subversive placement of the political body within the body politic. The two are inextricably linked.

References

Gilligan, J. (2001). Preventing violence. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Myers, C. (1994). Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world Christians. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Agricultural Sustainability

2011-09-26T09:36:00.002-05:00

Sustainability is an extremely elusive concept: the more one tries to define it the more it slips through one’s fingers. The word seems, as a rule, more general than specific. But it is largely abstract because definitions are often place-less. Definitions have no particular place in mind in which sustainability can put roots down and stick around for awhile. Certainly some generality is necessary, but without particularity holding this generality down it will float away. Applicability is key.

The original Brundtland definition was too abstract and overly anthropocentric. To be fair, anthropocentrism is not necessarily bad: a jellyfish would be medusacentric. And Brundtland’s and Robert Solow’s neoliberal economics are not the only manifestation of anthropocentrism. Wendell Berry could be considered anthropocentric because he is endlessly passionate about the life and health of human communities. But he is also deeply biocentric because he realizes that human life and health cannot come at the expense of what sustains it and because it cannot come at the expense of the life and health of our home and our nonhuman neighbors, who surely have just as much, if not more, of a right to live on this planet as we do. This synthesis is fertile ground for defining sustainability

A good definition of agricultural sustainability will be so burdened with adjectives that any speaker will trip over it. Ecology, the study of the household, is vital in this discussion, because it connotes the complex relationships of mutuality between various parts to create the whole. Health does not exist in isolation, but in beneficial membership to the entire household. Any definition that is worth its salt will recognize the complex relatedness between social, political, economic, ecological, and cultural issues. If the house is divided against itself it will not stand.

Agricultural sustainability imitates the diverse patterns and relationships of local ecosystems in order to sustain human and nonhuman communities in a particular place for as long as possible. Imitation is an important distinction: agricultural sustainability does not necessarily seek to recreate local ecosystems, but instead seeks to emulate local ecosystems. As such, it makes ends and means as commensurate as possible: it will not impede the land’s inherent ability for renewal and it will reduce (and ultimately eliminate) dependence on non-renewable energy except as a rare supplement. Agricultural sustainability contextually emerges from the study and practice of the whole household, characterized by self-renewal and restoration, stability and mutability, rootedness and longevity. It conserves and preserves biodiversity, soil fertility, watershed integrity, and sociocultural equity while maintaining a sustaining yield. Agricultural sustainability is bioregional and organic, which means it fosters community and culture, respects the limitations and gifts of carrying capacity, and defects as much as possible from dependence on an exploitive economy. It necessitates revitalized communities to care for the land, which should be redistributed into more cooperative ownerships or so people have the opportunity to work productive land (which is not just a Jeffersonian vision, but also a biblical-prophetic one and a distributist-economic one). Urban farming and the gardening of cities must also play a key creative role. None of this will happen overnight with the flick of a magic wand. Agricultural sustainability is a dynamic conversion.

Agricultural sustainability requires storytelling, consciously and critically joining the wisdom of the past with concrete practices in the present to address the potential of the future. As such, it builds up local tradition and culture like topsoil that preserves wisdom but also invites, indeed requires, future inputs and improvements. Marginal places and people must be welcomed in reconstituted communities and restructured systems that also imitate ecosystems (balance, resilience, vitality, diversity, mutuality, etc.) and harmonize with local ecosystems. Neighborliness will be emphasized. Limits must be set on production and consumption, which means that the ratio of farmer to acreage must be decreased. Distribution of surplus will be important as well, because distribution of food poses a greater threat to sustainability than the production of food.

As humans, we must address our needs, but we must do so with the realization that we are not the only, or indeed the most important, species inhabiting this planet. Evolution (and some religious traditions) bears witness to our interconnectedness and interdependence with the earth and fellow creatures. This tension will be a tightrope that cannot be walked in the abstract but only in responsible concrete practices. Sustainable agriculture is the mediator between the health of human culture and the health of the earth because it depends on the permanent renewal of both.

Conflict Transformation Style Assessment

2011-09-23T23:56:00.002-05:00

Personality profile tests are tricky for me. Not necessarily because they require limiting labels (as if human beings can, or should, escape limitations), but because they deal out de-contextualized situations and prefabricated options. The profile did prove useful, but as I took it I wanted to know what subject was being discussed in the group, who my fellow groups members were, where we were having the discussion, etc. The context would greatly determine my role within it and my response to it.

Even so, I find it interesting that my adjudicated style, Affiliating/Perfecting, is considered the activist style, something with which I resonate. I am committed to the grassroots and middle-range sectors of peacebuilding, to place and to people, and this style seems appropriate for these commitments. In our corner enclave of similarly-profiled classmates, we discussed common themes of our (past and future) work: strong values, willingness to question authority, cooperation, passion, engagement, loyalty, etc. Unfortunately, perverted manifestations of these convictions can breed elitism and even hatefulness, arrogantly dividing the world into good guys and bad guys with little room for nuance or critical questions. There is a fine line between confronting dehumanization and dehumanizing those you confront. That fine line, however, is a tightrope that must be walked: sides must be taken, because neutrality votes for the oppressor. But activists must stand firm on unsettled ground, because we can never be smugly certain, as if we are sole recipients of the Revelation of Absolute Truth. Ironically, this ambiguity embraces convicted action, but action seasoned with interrogatory ethics: asking questions of the systems and structures of the world while simultaneously asking the same questions of ourselves, exposing our own contingencies and construction. Such an ethics, so needed in every conflict transformation style, would be radical in the etymological sense of the word: routing out the roots of our socioeconomic and political injustices and retrieving the roots of our sustaining and subversive stories. In this radicalism, the synthesis of loving our neighbors and loving our enemies is vital.

As classmates in other groups shared their styles and experiences, distinctive lines blurred like a gradual shading of color into color, each style contributing to a mosaic of peacebuilders. Instead of differences dominated by hierarchy and distrust, a diversity of gifts emerged characterized by the collaboration of organizers, facilitators, analyzers, reconcilers, and activists. Indeed, I saw myself in several other styles, since my work has required harmonizing, directing, and certainly analyzing. But the energy for my commitment to marginalized and dispossessed people and places has come more from an “affiliating/perfecting” spirit, from an activist bent, which has grown from deep roots in my life.

I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, one of the poorest areas of the United States, where my father was a family doctor working with a community healthcare center, clinic, and hospital dedicated to the uninsured. My family has also crafted a close connection to Israel and Palestine over the past forty years. Like many American Christians, my family championed Israel despite knowing little about the Palestinian perspective, even though we had Palestinian friends for as long as we had Israeli friends. Over the last ten years, however, my family’s perspective on the conflict has progressively shifted (perhaps due in part to an interrogatory ethic) from one of steadfast support of Israel to an intimate connection with the plight of the Palestinians. I have worked as a journalist in Ramallah with the Palestine Monitor, a web-based news source committed to “exposing life under occupation.” I traveled throughout the West Bank, writing several articles about the village of Ni’lin, whose olive groves and roads were (and are) fractured due to the construction of the separation wall. I witnessed and engaged with villagers, as well as Israeli and international activists, nonviolently protesting the confiscation and devastation of their land. And I watched and felt the effects as police and military repeatedly responded with teargas, rubber-coated bullets, and live fire. I served as a writer and editor with Musalaha (“reconciliation” in Arabic), which is committed to uniting Israeli Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians. I was given a list of Israelis and Palestinians to interview and then incarnate my skeletal notes as stories about encounters with the other and events of reconciliation, which was published as a book in December. I also worked with the Al-Basma Center, a creative and restorative place for people with developmental disabilities. Through activities like olivewood carving, recycled card-making, weaving, making fuel from sawdust, a greenhouse, drama, speech therapy, and hygiene classes, the students are taught practical and artistic skills and the belief that they are vital members and contributors to their community. The marginalized of the marginalized are welcomed as fully human.

These experiences, and my placement in the style assessment, highlight the necessity of praxis. Reflective practitioners understand the relatedness of conflict transformation styles, a relationship that advocates addressing root causes of violence, tending the connected branches of the peacemaking tree, and testing the soil of conflict and the inequitable distribution of power and privilege (Enns & Myers, 2009, p. 44). Unfortunately, activists sometimes lack the attentive patience and hospitable openness this requires. The subsequent danger of this style is burnout, the edge of which I have seen myself in only a short amount of time. This danger seems attributable to a wide variety of reasons, but I think certainly to a lack of familiarity with (or even respect for) the other branches of the tree, such as analyzing and preserving, accommodating and harmonizing. Also, in my experience activists often lack community. A group of individuals committed to the same goal or having the same conversation does not constitute community: they share nothing but ideas, which can be fleeting. Healthy activists and movements seem to be grounded in a sustaining community with shared space, time, resources, memories, values, and practices. Jean Vanier suggests that “To struggle for a cause it is best for people to be rooted in a community where they are learning reconciliation, acceptance of difference and of their own darkness, and how to celebrate . . . A community that does not celebrate is in danger of becoming just a group of people that get things done” (2010, p. 169, 97). Activists are so preoccupied with the future that they forget response-ability to the present moment. We need prophetic communities that microcosmically cultivate a restorative culture and imagine what the alternative future looks like right now.

Similarly, activists can also emphasize ends too much. I might very easily burn out if I thought results were the most important thing, that my work will definitely achieve all my goals, that I can ‘save the world’ and ‘feed the hungry’ and ‘create world peace.’ To think on that scale, I would be forced to conjure up grand abstract schemes that might look eerily similar to those with grand abstract schemes to ‘take over the world.’ Both operate by massive top-level implementation which ironically necessitates destructively reductionist thinking. Clearly, ends can never be ignored, especially for those in the belly of the beast. And the end goal of nonviolent direct action is negotiation and, if possible, reconciliation. Means and ends must be as commensurate as possible. But idealism about achieving those ends will only sow seeds for cynicism, a common trait amongst activists I know (myself included). Idealism leads to abstraction which leads to failure which leads to burnout. Activists may need deeper and more concrete reasons than absolute assurance and quick realization of ends, which may or may not come. In the end, there may be no such thing as peace. In the end, there is only peacemaking.

References

Enns, E. and Myers, C. (2009). Ambassadors of Reconciliation Volume II: Diverse Christian
Practices of Restorative Justice and Peacemaking. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Vanier, J., & Whitney-Brown, C. (ed.). (2010). Jean Vanier: Essential writings. Maryknoll:
Orbis Books.

A House Divided: Reflection on Lederach's Building Peace

2011-09-21T21:15:00.000-05:00

I know someone who has hoped to make a career out of working in occupied Palestine. During a discussion about the imminent Palestinian bid for statehood, he quipped that, if the request succeeded, he might be out of a job before he even gets started. He probably meant it sardonically, but the implication seemed to be that a Palestinian state would solve everything, as if abject poverty, community disintegration, Muslim-Christian hostility, political infighting, ecological destruction, and IDF-mimicking police forces would just suddenly vanish in the wake of a salvific state. In the end, there may be no such thing as peace. In the end, there is only peacemaking.

John Paul Lederach knows that peacebuilding must delve much deeper than statist perspectives (1997, p. xvi). I appreciated his acknowledgment of the symptomatic residue of structural and systemic diseases (ibid, p. 57). While the actual surface of conflict must be addressed (and, at times, must be addressed in the very moment in which the encounter summons us to respond), the root causes that grew into what we see must also be tended to; further still, the soil around the roots might need a little testing as well. Deformed roots will continue to sprout if we ignore infected soil. Imbalances of power and privilege make for uneven ground.

I was treading on familiar ground when Lederach discussed reconciliation (ibid, p. 23-35). I served as a writer and editor with an organization called Musalaha, which means “reconciliation” in Arabic. Musalaha is committed to creating space for reconciliation (ibid, p. 29) between Israeli Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians, hoping to then build bridges to the distant shores of mainstream society. Even so, Musalaha struggles to fully test the soil of conflict. While they do occasionally discuss historical harms and trauma, mercy and forgiveness are given a much bigger plot of land than truth and justice. Musalaha attempts to walk a string-thin line. They are in an extremely volatile situation as an NGO predominantly funded by Evangelical Christians, many of whom still ardently support Israel. The director (a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship) says he has “an itch for justice” and is ready for Musalaha to speak more boldly. However, if they cry justice for their beloved country too loudly, many Israelis won’t come to conferences and retreats. But if Musalaha continues a more neutral stance on political issues, Palestinians will consider their silence as normalizing the occupation and they may not come much longer either. There will be no peace without reconciliation through justice, which, as Cornel West reminds us, “is what love looks like in public” (Dillon, 2008).

A friend of Lederach’s once exclaimed that truth, mercy, justice, and peace meet in a place called reconciliation (1997, p. 29). This spring, I worked with some of my closest friends in Mozambique at a resource center and organic farm called Malo Ga Kujilana (MGK), which in Chiyao means “place of reconciliation.” More literally, the name translates as “the place of coming together,” etymologically referring to the reparation of a marriage after separation. This actual place incarnates the reconciliation of people with their neighbors and of neighbors with the earth. MGK partners with local villages to nurture imagination and wholeness through sustainable agriculture, non-monetary micro-loans, nutrition programs, sanitation initiatives, storytelling, and living life well together. This concreteness seems absent in some peacebuilding discussions and programs. Lederach is right to emphasize partiality and advocacy (ibid, p. 50) because relationship is the alpha and omega of conflict and peace (ibid, p. 26) and must therefore have a specific locus (ibid, p. 29). In the effort to be socially relevant, peacebuilding may have lost some of that prophetic voice. Often, it seems, peacebuilders want to address root causes but don’t want to put down roots. I am not extremely sympathetic to conflict junkies: transience breeds abstraction, around which the danger of global thinking revolves. Those with grand abstract schemes to ‘save the world’ don’t always think that differently from those with grand abstract schemes to ‘take over the world.’ Both must operate on reductionist assumptions and the myth of the White Man’s Burden. Indeed, the most successful global thinkers have been imperial governments and multinational corporations (Berry, 1993, p. 19). This is in no way a call for withdrawal; on the contrary, isolation can be just as dangerous and justice necessitates imaginative conversation and respectful generosity for the plurality of the world’s local places (ibid, p. 50). No place is wholly free while another is enslaved, no place wholly healed while another is diseased. However, I do have questions as to whether massive ‘global solutions’ to ‘global problems’ will be any less destructive than the problems which they seek to solve. Contrary to popular belief, I think size does matter.

I am not haunted and convicted by the land between the river and the sea because of the “Israel-Palestine conflict,” which is such an overwhelmingly abstract concept. We certainly need our helpful heuristic devices, but they often morph into meta-narratives that gloss over, or erase, complexities and particularities. So I do not go because of “the Conflict.” I am convicted because of names, faces, stories, and places. And, increasingly, I am convicted of names, faces, stories, and places in my own homeland. Americans sometimes travel far away from home to realize that their neighbors are suffering too. I think it may be easier for Americans to romantically care about the effects of global inequity (starving kids on the other side of the world) than to care about the affects of that inequity (‘free’ economic forces and systems based on what Dr. King called the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism). Those questions are too hard to ask because the answers expose our complicity in those causes. We can’t just withdraw and pretend like systems and structures don’t need to be changed.

I think critiques of the withdrawal of the ‘quiet in the land’ have been valid, but I worry that for the sake of validity peacebuilders have sacrificed vitality. Lederach hints at the need for an image or vision of the future toward which we are building (ibid, p. 76-7), but in my mind this deserves much more attention. We need communities that microcosmically cultivate a restorative culture, prophetically imagining what the alternative future looks like right now. These visions must be practiced in a rooted community, like MGK, the Amish, Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, a Gandhian ashram, Buddhist sanghas, or Christian monastic movements (old and new). I think we should advocate for a kind of withdrawal: defection from oppressive systems and practices in order to inhabit something better. All addicts need rehabilitation, and rehabilitation requires limitations, accountability, and commitment. But I must constantly recognize that my ability to defect is in many ways due to my privilege within the very system from which I am withdrawing, which therefore means I must also work to carve out alternatives for others and help dismantle unjust structures.

Because of this, I am admittedly biased toward the grassroots and middle-range sectors (Lederach, 1997, p. 39). I do think policies need to be changed, but I think most changes in policies have been the result of community organizing and movements by the most disenfranchised, whether it be civil rights, unemployment benefits, health and safety standards, food and drug regulations, fair housing statutes, etc (Myers, 1994, p. 218). Gandhi didn’t achieve relevancy by moving to the capitol and attempting to reform the Metonyms on their terms. He had an influential voice with the Powers that Be, but he also lived out his future vision in the present in the marginal places of the world. Proximity matters: where I live, who I live there with, and how I live there define my relationship to the world. Aside from water and shit, not much of anything ever trickles down (Lederach, 1997, p. 45), especially ‘reagonomically’: the pipes always seem to get clogged, or just re-routed. The top-level seems like a vacuum into which good-hearted people can get sucked because they believe they can change something that has such overpowering centripetal force. This is what empire does: colonize the good intentions of the noble who desire to force the flow in a centrifugal direction. I am honestly cynical that this works, because the top-level can colonize people who didn’t work in that sector (and therefore weren’t even on the payroll). Martin Luther King is a sentimental bobble-head on a broken record player: “I have a dream! I have a dream! I have a dream!” Thank goodness! We never have to hear what that dream actually entailed, especially the dreams he had and planned to proclaim right before he got shot in the head. Jesus of Nazareth is muzzled as the meek and mild Savior and the privatized poster child for the empire that executed him as a political dissident. We piously say that if we had lived in the time of our ancestors we would never have killed the prophets. Instead, we would just automate them by replaying decontextualized (and depoliticized) sound bites and giving them annual national holidays. Can David ever defeat Goliath on the giant’s terms?

Lederach relates the excellent societal metaphor of a House (ibid, pp. xv, 37). He notes opposing theories about how to approach this House (ibid, p. 37), but he seems to think that all levels and approaches have legitimacy (ibid, p. 60). Surely they are interrelated, but are they equally legitimate? This is an honest question, not a loaded one, one that constantly disturbs my settled answers. I am not suggesting that we can ignore the power of the top-level and how it relates to the middle-range and grassroots sectors. After all, the top-level can build a wall through my olive groves whether I acknowledge it or not. He may indeed be right, but I think there is a difference between acknowledging its existence and accepting it. The blueprints of our House called for liberty and justice for all, but the actual foundation was built on white supremacy, patriarchy, and oligarchy (Myers, 1994, p. 203). This House in which we live was built more by enslaved Africans than by free Europeans, and we evicted the previous inhabitants whose House (or should I say, Houses), while more structurally simple, was far more sound and secure (perhaps because it was simple). The opposing theories mentioned by Lederach seem to me to lie at the heart of the matter. One approach believes social injustices are a personal and policy problem: the House needs some slight adjustments and some redecorating, but it’s structurally fine. The other approach thinks that these injustices stem from the very history and formations of economic and political structures themselves: the House cannot simply be repainted, but might be in need of extensive renovation.

Because a House divided against itself cannot stand.

References

Berry, W. (1993). Sex, economy, freedom, and community: Eight essays. New York City:
Pantheon Books

Dillon, J. (Producer, Screenwriter/Director). (2008). Call+Response [Motion Picture]. United States: Fair Trade Pictures.

Lederach, J. (1997). Building peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided societies. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace

Myers. C. (1994). Who will roll away the stone?: Discipleship queries for first world christians. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Interrogation Part III

2011-03-13T15:09:00.000-05:00

I slunk into the chair next to Patrick and Paul, who turned to me expectantly but without speaking.

“Well,” I started in answer to their gaze, “on the bright side, looks like we might go back to Porto Rafti today.”

I barely had time to explain before I was called back in again. The pregnant woman still sat with fingers interlaced, but standing beside her was the first official who questioned us. Her arms were crossed and she watched me until I sat down. Suddenly she flew forward and slammed the door.

“You lied to me!” she yelled as she returned to the other side of the table. “You are a liar!”

I immediately started sweating. This was now going much worse than I anticipated. I took a deep breath to regain my composure.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, but I didn’t lie.”

“You did not tell me you were volunteering,” she retorted.

I countered, “You didn’t ask me if I was volunteering.”

Her jaw tightened and she slammed her fist on the table.

“You are a liar!” she cried and pointed her finger at me. “If you lie, you think you can get in to Israel? I am the authority and I get to decide to let you back in or not! If you want to get in to Israel you need to tell the truth!”

I assured her that I meant to do so. So the interrogation began.

“You did not tell me you have been volunteering,” she repeated. “Where have you been working?”

I said I wrote and edited with an NGO in Jerusalem.

“Where else?”

Her tone seemed confident enough that I decided not to test her knowledge of my life.

“I have also worked with a center for youth and adults with developmental disabilities near Bethlehem.”

The woman from immigration now spoke: “You have to have a volunteer visa for this.”

This was news to me, and I told her so.

“You can’t do what you’re doing,” she persisted. “You can’t have a three-month visa and then leave and then come back and get another three-month visa.”

“Since when?” I answered with a furrowed brow. I was willing to concede that the policy may exist somewhere in fine print but it certainly wasn’t regularly enforced. “Everybody does this. When people leave to go to Jordan and come back, you just give them another three months. I’ve seen this.”

She seemed to ignore me.

“You’re only allowed one three-month visa per year.”

“Since when?” I said again. “I was here last March and then came back in September and then got another visa in November.”

“It’s always been this way.”

I pressed the issue and said, “Is there somewhere where I could read about this?”

She looked up in the air and shrugged.
“Uh, Ministry of Tourism, maybe.”

The first woman turned to face the wall behind her and continued her line of questioning.
“You did not tell me you have been to Hebron.”

“Well, I haven’t.”

She spun around with fierce alacrity.
“I’ve read your blog. You’ve been to Hebron.”

I remembered a story I wrote about an excursion to Hebron during the summer I worked as a journalist.

“But that was a year ago,” I objected. “You didn’t ask me where I went a year ago, you asked where I went on this trip.”

“That is a lie!” she maintained.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said, and I think I said it sincerely.

She placed both palms on the edge of the table and leaned forward until she was halfway across to me. I leaned back as much as I could.

“I have every reason now to deport you,” she said. “If I do, you will be banned from reentry for ten years.”

I looked from face to face and wondered why Patrick and Paul hadn’t been invited to share in this experience with me.

“Tell me why I should let you back in to Israel,” she said, pacing beside my chair.

My mouth hung open as I scrambled for compelling reasons. I said the first thing that came to mind.

“Well, we, we help the economy, I mean, we’re, we’re buying things here.”
I bit my tongue, surprised that I used capitalism as an excuse for a visa. She almost laughed.

“A lot of people help the economy. You’re not that special. Give me another reason!”

“Umm, my dad is coming to do medical lectures at Ben Gurion University in a week, and so we are hoping to meet up with him.”

She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth, unimpressed.
“That’s not good enough, give me another reason.”

I thought for a moment and said, “It’s going to cost a lot of money for us to change our flights from April to now and we don’t have much money.”

“I don’t care how much money it costs you,” she shrugged. “These are not good reasons.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, raising my hands in exasperation, “but you asked me to give you reasons, and I’m just trying to give you the reasons that you asked for.”

“How long have we been holding you now?” she asked, standing behind the woman from immigration who still sat with her stocky arms on the table.

“Three-and-a-half hours?” I guessed.

She smirked. “Well, it’s been a lot longer than that, and I don’t mind keeping you all night until you start talking.”

“I’m trying to answer the questions that you’re asking me!” I exclaimed.

“If you had told me the truth three-and-a-half hours ago, you would have had no problems and gotten out.”

She tried to continue but I interrupted.

“Wait, wait a minute,” I said confused. “You’re saying that if I had told you we had volunteered with Palestinians in the West Bank, you would have let us through, immediately, without any questions?”

Both of them looked at me and said, “Yes, of course.”

I laughed and said “Really?” I wanted to say, “How come I can’t lie, but you can lie?” I resisted that temptation.

The official pointed at the door and ordered, “Get out. Go wait outside.”

Patrick said they could hear her yelling at me, catching words like liar, deportation, ten years. He also said he was glad it was me and not him. Then, for the last time, I was called back in to the office. Only the pregnant woman from immigration sat there. She sat very still and spoke calmly.

“Even though you lied to us, and even though you have not told us what we have asked for at every turn, we will give each of you a one-month visa.”

“Is there any way that we could get two months?” I requested slowly and softly for fear of treading on thin ice. “Our flight is April 23rd and that’s all we want.”

“No, I can’t! I should actually deport you now because you lied, and you’ll be banned for ten years.”

“Well,” I gulped, “I guess we’ll take the one month.”

After four-and-a-half-hours we walked outside to a cool night, one I barely noticed. I numbly climbed into a transport van just outside the terminal. All I wanted was to sit by a fire in the house on the hill. Thinking could wait until later. I let my head smack against the window. The sun had already gone down across the Mediterranean and we drove to Jerusalem in darkness.

Interrogation Part II

2011-03-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

“Please wait here,” she said, pointing to a row of chairs in a secluded back-corner room. “I’ll call you individually.”

We slumped down in our chairs, bags smacking the floor, blank expressions staring across at a blank wall. All I could think to say was “Shit.”

“We’re gonna have to pay a bunch of money to change our flights and we won’t see our stuff again,” Paul mumbled. He leaned his head back and chuckled. “Maybe they’ll at least send us back to Greece.”

Patrick thrust his legs out in front of him and said, “Not gonna lie, but when I saw you come around the corner with a security guard I definitely thought about running. They already gave me my three-month visa!”

Over the next hour, we were each escorted into a small office where the security official sat behind a large desk. Patrick went first, then me, and Paul last. All of us heard similar questions: why we went to Greece, where we were from, what our parents’ birthdates are. The woman rarely looked at me, typing quickly and facing a wide computer monitor turned so far away from me that she almost had to lean to see it herself. Her ponytailed hair was curly like confetti and she wore an unmarked windbreaker. I glanced at several maps near my head as she drummed the keyboard. She was fairly friendly for the time being, laughing that I actually knew my parents’ birthdates (which made it seem stranger that she even asked) and commenting that I must like Israel a lot considering all the stamps in my passport. I smiled.

“So,” she said, still typing even though I hadn’t said anything in several minutes, “what have you done in Israel?”

While we sat dejected in the corner waiting area, the three of us reviewed our responses. We had discussed them before, most recently a week earlier as we prepared to fly to Greece, but we passed through security faster than I’ve ever seen. Palestinian and Israeli friends had cautioned me not to share too much of what I do in the West Bank. But I have no desire to lie because I have no desire to make things easier for myself by editing out the existence of my Palestinian friends. Instead, I try to answer questions honestly as they’re asked. If it wasn’t specifically asked, it doesn’t need to be specifically answered.

“Well, we’ve done some backpacking and tourism,” I responded, which was true. We backpacked around the Galilee and I to different cities for interviews and we frequented sites designated as tourist attractions. “I have family friends here and we’ve visited them as well.”

She asked Patrick a more pointed question: “Where have you been in the West Bank?”

He thought for a moment before saying, “Ah, we’ve been to Bethlehem, we hiked the Wadi Qelt so we ended up in Jericho, and we went to Ramallah for a day . . .”

She quickly interrupted.
“Where else? Have you been to Nablus? Have you been to Qalqiliya? Jenin? Tulkarem? Have you been to Hebron?”

Patrick narrowed his eyes and pensively sucked his teeth.
“Shepherd’s Field?” he ventured.

Singing angels, immaculate conceptions, and incense-flooded caves outside of Bethlehem didn’t seem to interest her so she sent him back outside to wait.

After the interviews, wait we did. I called my dad several times, discussing possible answers or contingency plans if things went sour. After nearly an hour-and-a-half, a very stern and very pregnant woman walked into the room. She held photocopies of our passports and looked at each one of us in turn.

“Please, come with me,” she said in abrupt syllabic punctuations.

She led us to the other side of the passport control area where we once again sat down in another enclave, partitioned into a waiting room and two adjacent offices. I was called into the office momentarily. I stood and took a deep breath, Patrick gave me a thumbs-up, and Paul stared at the ceiling. I sat down in the cold undecorated room across from the pregnant woman who embedded her thick elbows into the table’s surface. She flipped through stapled papers in front of her.

Then she set them aside and said, “I’m from immigration. We need to talk.”

She repeated many of the questions asked by the first lady, but very quickly her subtly faded away.

“Have you been volunteering?”

I faltered, caught off guard by her directness.
“Well, we’ve backpacked, we’ve been tourists.”

“Have you been volunteering?” she repeated with severe precision.

I cleared my throat and said, “Well, I’ve written some for an organization based in Jerusalem.”

“Who do you know here?”

I listed off a few names, Israeli names of family friends and coworkers. When I did the same at the Israel-Jordan border and mentioned that my grandfather had worked on excavation sites and taught in Jerusalem, we were quickly granted three-month visas and sent on our way. This woman from immigration took, at least in my experience, the road less traveled.

“Give me their phone numbers. I’m going to call them.”

The number I pressed dialed Musalaha’s administrator. She answered evasively, confirming that I had written some for them but appropriately fibbing that she didn’t know me well enough to answer more questions. The woman from immigration was unsatisfied. She slid the phone back across the table and wiped her forehead. The room was too quiet and too empty so the quietness filled it until it mutated into eeriness. Finally, she interlaced her thick fingers, her neck lowering beneath her broad shoulders, and she looked squarely at me again.

“We know what you are doing,” she declared dramatically. “We googled you.”

I googled myself later. The first hit was a link to articles I wrote about visiting Palestinian cities and the devastating effect of the occupation. The second hit was the blog I kept while living in Ramallah. The blog had links to stories I wrote for the Palestine Monitor.

“So we know. Wait outside.”

Interrogation Part I

2011-03-13T15:00:00.001-05:00

Our plane touched down and skidded liked a skipped pebble across the runway at Ben Gurion Airport. The loquacious woman behind me attempted to instigate a round of applause; apparently not enough religious pilgrims were onboard and her plan awkwardly sputtered when no one accompanied her. The seat-belt sign chimed off and I retrieved my backpack from the overhead compartment.

Patrick, Paul, and I were returning from a week-long visa renewal trip to Greece. Our alma mater has numerous campus locations around the globe for study-abroad programs, including one in Porto Rafti on the east coast of Greece; both Paul and Patrick studied there in undergrad. During the semester, along with many excursions to Athens and the Peloponnese, the group travels to Turkey, Egypt, and Israel. A few weeks before our visas expired, we hosted the traveling school when they visited Bethlehem, a new addition to their schedule. For years, even for years after the second intifada, Harding claimed Bethlehem was too dangerous and would only point longingly to the city from the safety of the Mount of Olives. We introduced the group to the Al-Basma Center and presented a slideshow lecture in our living room on the Israeli occupation and resulting humanitarian crisis. The program director invited us to Greece whenever we felt the urge, and since our second visa was rapidly winding down, we felt the urge very soon.

My family and I lived in Greece for several months during a sabbatical in 2001. I was enchanted with Greece, the land and culture and myths. My younger brother and I roamed around ruins looking for fauns and naked goddesses, the former of which we never found; we frequently saw the naked part on beaches and at every magazine kiosk. I went back after my summer in Palestine in 2008; two friends and I backpacked from Turkey to northern Greece where we hiked and camped around the floating monasteries of Meteora before hopping on a train to Athens. The timing worked out well for this most recent excursion. The three of us were a little tired and I was certainly ready for a brief break from editing the Musalaha book. We climbed the coastal mountains around Porto Rafti, stayed up late talking with students, inhaled greasy gyros in the Plaka, crept through ancient temples like little kids, and even stripped and dipped into the icy Aegean, gasping and struggling to stay afloat like whimpering shaved dogs. I mourned the end of the week, but I was ready to get back to Beit Sahour, back to what I felt like I should be doing. Most of our friends behind the Concrete Curtain aren’t able to visit the sea and hiking trails are seized with settlement expansion. My sadness was another reminder of my enduring options.

Our flight touched down on February 23rd, two months to the day before our final departure. At least, we hoped we would have two more months. Passport control stood between us and our April exit. My fingers were crossed as we disembarked.

As soon as we exited the jet way, a security guard jumped out of nowhere and requested our passports. All three of us choked on our hearts that had suddenly catapulted into our throats. She only asked a few questions about where we had been and how long we were planning on staying before she waved us forward. We swallowed and high-fived as soon as we passed around the corner.

Only a few people filtered through the passport control booths, so the three of us approached separate windows. Patrick was through in barely a minute with a three-month visa stamped in the back of his blue passport. I stifled an ecstatic smile; this was going much better than I anticipated. But as soon as I slid my passport underneath the window’s edge, a security official appeared next to my right elbow. I was amazed by their ability to spontaneously materialize. She said nothing except a brief word to her coworker who slowly thumbed through my passport. She watched me intently as I occasionally peeked in paranoia out of the corner of my eye, trying to answer quick questions from the man behind the glass. Suddenly, she leaned forward and whispered something in Hebrew to her cloistered colleague. He looked up at me.

“Wait,” he said, interrupting something I hadn’t said, “when was the last time you were in Israel?”

“Oh, only a week ago,” I said with strained nonchalance. I motioned at Paul standing at the adjoining kiosk. “We just went to visit some friends in Greece. We have a flight out later.”

The woman slowly shifted until she faced me, her arm propped on the narrow lip of the counter. She spoke to me for the first time.
“When?”

I stammered, “Oh, uh, in, uh, in two months. We fly out two months from today.”

“Two months?” she said forcefully though without much surprise. “This is a long time.” She paused for a moment and my mouth dried out.

“No,” she continued, “you need to come with me.”

She snapped her fingers for my passport and turned for Paul’s. Then she pivoted toward me again.

“Where is the third one?” she annunciated slowly.

I had said nothing to the man behind the glass about a third one.

You Have Heard It Said: Events of Reconciliation

2010-12-14T23:13:00.006-06:00

Today, I received two copies of my first book, You Have Heard It Said: Events of Reconciliation. The book is about Israeli and Palestinian participants of Musalaha ('reconciliation' in Arabic) and their stories about encountering the other. It was a rather surreal experience to hold the book in my hands, a culmination of months of interviews, traveling to interviews, typing up sloppy notes, wrestling the notes into stories and reworking the stories, editing and re-editing, etc. The process was challenging and frustrating, but the experience was nourishing in many ways.

So, as a shameless plug, the book can be ordered from the publisher's website here: http://wipfandstock.com/store/You_Have_Heard_It_Said_Events_of_Reconciliation

The Dogmatic Identity of Christianity

2010-10-22T22:27:00.007-05:00

I recently participated in a panel at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. We had quite a crowd, thoughtful responses to the question, and challenging and stimulating conversation. It was an honor to be a part of the evening. The following are my thoughts on the question to which we were asked to respond.

“How can Christianity overcome its dogmatism without losing its identity?”

I take issue with this question. I take issue with the question because it doesn’t end with “overcome its dogmatism.” Perhaps the fear of losing identity in the forfeiture of dogmatism is simply dogmatism wearing a thin mask because now we have no clear distinction, no line in the sand, between us and the other. Identity is important, inevitable, necessary. Identity is our sense of self, giving us meaning and mission, as much performative as it is informative. But the formation of identity often stems from a desire for power, a fear of doubt, and a need to make enemies: we need to know who is different from us so we can protect ourselves.

I take issue with the question because people are still kicking and screaming about how to define Christianity after two thousand years and I only have five minutes. And I take issue with the question because it assumes Christianity actually exists. There is really no such thing as Christianity, only Christianities in different times and cultures. Church history is filled with councils and reformations, wrought with power plays and accusations of heresy, all in the effort to pin down identity. Creeds were written, doctrines set in stone, and dissidents burned at the stake for the sake of finally figuring out the definitive nature of Christianity. Change is too discomforting for institutions. Perhaps we could agree that dogmatism, the arrogant claim that one’s opinions are the Absolute Truth, has an acidic taste, a dissonant ring. But when our own opinions are questioned we uncoil and strike with venomous ferocity because someone shook our certain identity.

But identity is not so certain. Each second changes who we are, and our identity is new every morning. We grow old and lose our memories, forgetting faces and names and our life’s work. Our identities are not static. The only way we make sense of life is by living within a story that orders the flux. When our memories and concrete sense of self fade away, relationships remain. Whatever else Christianity has become, it began as a relationship to stories prejudiced by a love for the poor and poor in spirit, stories that subverted the accepted religious and cultural identity of their day, and for those who have ears to hear, perhaps ours. As long as Christianity is worried about losing its identity then it cannot overcome its dogmatism. Christianity is dogmatic because it needs to have an ultimate identity other than emptying itself for the least of these without blessed assurance.

The Greek word kenosis, in Christian theology, means “self-emptying,” exemplified in Paul’s recitation of a hymn in Philippians 2:5-11 (“Your attitude should be that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking on the very nature of a servant”). Kenosis is arguably the most unique aspect of Christianity: the Father self-emptied into the Son, who emptied himself for his own small corner of the world (a particularity which achieves universality), and who his followers are to imitate. Kenosis is not about metaphysics, but about performative identity. Christian identity here is not based on the self but is found by losing the self, by emptying the self for others. Aphorisms like “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all” and “Whoever wishes to save his life must first lose it” spin the desire to maintain our own identity on its head. Because in order for us to find our identity we must first lose it. And not because after losing our identity we will find it, but because the act of losing is finding. We have sold everything to posses the pearl of great price, but the only way to experience its wealth is by giving it away.

Christian identity must be willingly tenuous in response to the fragile event of the kingdom of God. The only dogma this kingdom knows is love, is justice, is compassion, is hospitality, is forgiveness. We invite in the stranger who might overstay their welcome; we clothe the naked who might take our cloak and our tunic; we feed the hungry who might eat us out of house and home; we forgive our transgressors who might not even be sorry; we love our real and invented enemies, men who might kill us in our sleep or who might even sleep with other men, or for that matter women with women, or women who demand equality with men. All of our doctrine and dogma and creeds must be like chaff to this wheat. Even those who know nothing, or want to know nothing, about the kingdom participate in its incarnation: “Lord, when did we see you? Whatever you did for the least of these . . .” If we are to be dogmatic, then we must be dogmatic about the madness, the illogic, the impossibility, the audacity of the kingdom of God.

Jesus had the audacity to take his entire religious wisdom tradition to the threshing floor and this is what he said remained: “Love God, love your neighbor,” which are inseparably one and the same. He knew the law and the prophets. He knew the commandments, purity codes, and Sabbath rules given by God that gave his people their identity, things he never abolished or rejected out of hand. But he knew that the only way he could remain faithful to this tradition was by betraying it when it favored the powerful, the wealthy, the holy, the clean, and the insiders. The prophets said that even God kept subverting God’s laws, saying mercy trumped sacrifice and liberation unseated fasting. Jesus said the voice in the burning bush who said “I-shall-be-there-however-I-shall-be-there” shall be there as love. And love is only love when it loves the unlovable. If the imperfect vessel of the law meant to direct love, prohibits love, then love disobeys to commune with sinners.

Jesus reveled in vulnerable communion by sharing meals with disabled, dysfunctional, disassociated people. His open commensality infuriated the religious elites because he didn’t require purity and assimilation before association. They called Jesus a glutton and drunk, probably accusing him of sleeping with prostitutes. And we have no record that he cared.

His hometown congregants were impressed when he told them that the Jubilee was fulfilled in their hearing; they tried to throw him off a cliff when he said unclean foreigners were in on it too. He bumped up against the cultural bigotry of his identity when he called one of those foreigners a dog, but she made him eat his words when she said dogs are hungry too; without hesitation he swallowed his words and said her daughter was free because she had freed him.

He invited terrorists and imperial brownnosers to join him; he overturned patriarchy by honoring women and receiving children; he challenged the scribal authorities by reinterpreting the narratives they championed; he told stories with Samaritans as good guys and fathers embracing stained sons before they repented. The law required the death penalty for adultery, but Jesus said only the perfect man could throw the first stone.

As long as Christianity protects its identity with authoritative doctrine from living face to face with the suffering world, as long as it refuses the call of responsibility from an encounter with the other by citing scripture, then dogmatism insidiously persists like an unholy ghost.

After all, the Sabbath was made for man . . .

Turn the Other Cheek

2010-10-11T22:33:00.002-05:00

New Testament scholar Walter Wink coined the phrase “the myth of redemptive violence” and reinterprets angelic and demonic principalities and powers as the ethos exuded by groups, institutions, and governments. He also challenges the Sunday-school versions of Jesus’ teachings, identifying them as much more earthy, radical, and subversive when situated in the sociopolitical, economic, and religious matrix of first-century Roman-occupied Palestine. In particular, Wink vehemently challenges the assertion that Jesus taught passive compliance, or said nothing at all, toward the powers that be. Faulty translations and ignorance regarding cultural and historical context have led to the assumption that Jesus promoted submission in the face of conflict. However, says Wink, Jesus offered an alternative response to fight or flight, a third way. That third way is what we call nonviolence, and what Jesus called “do not resist an evil person with evil” and “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” Nonviolence, loving our enemies, is a way of engaging conflict without dehumanization through violence. Blessed are the peacemakers, those who go the second mile, who give their cloak as well as their tunic, who turn the other cheek.

These are not spiritual platitudes uttered from a serene mountaintop, encouraging good little boys and girls to play nice in the schoolyard. These are life-threatening reversals strategically crafted in the dirt of poverty and imperial occupation for the weak to use the power of powerlessness. Peacemakers are like sheep among wolves, but these sheep have a few tricks up their wool coats, as innocent as doves but as shrewd as serpents.

“Now,” says the Galilean prophet, his voice lowering to a humming whisper as the crowd leans in to listen, “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek.”

Wink digs down to the gritty nature of this act. A strike on the right cheek logistically requires a punch with the left hand. But the left hand was considered unclean in that right-handed world; a member of Qumran could be excluded for only gesturing with the left hand. Striking the right cheek meant using the back of the right hand, and a backhand slap was an insult, reserved for punishing or humiliating inferiors. “Masters backhanded slaves,” Wink writes, “husbands, wives; parents, children; men, women; Romans, Jews.” Responding violently would be suicide. The only possible reaction was submission.

But turning the other cheek, Wink explains, “robs the oppressor of the power to humiliate.” The oppressor can’t backhand with the unclean hand, but using a fist recognizes the inferior as an equal. The first attack reinforced humiliation, but the second, if it comes, will unintentionally level the ground. In that moment, for a brief moment, the dehumanizing hierarchy of power shatters with the slightest turn of the head.

My family's good friend Edward Tabash owns a souvenir shop near the Bethlehem checkpoint, inside the ghetto formed by the separation wall. The store sits on Hebron Road, once the main road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. With a prime location on the shoulder of the major street and his own olivewood factory, Edward and his store garnered an esteemed reputation and a steady stream of customers. However, the second intifada exploded and the separation wall fell on Hebron Road like an axe, amputating it on either side of Edward’s shop. Business rapidly evaporated without the regular procession of tour buses. Instead of firing anyone due to budget losses, Edward paid his entire staff out of his pocket for several years.

Edward’s commercial transactions have awarded him some privileges, including a Businessman's Card which occasionally allows him to drive into Jerusalem and fly out of Ben Gurion Airport. However, the card does not prevent ethnic profiling even though he has flown out of Ben Gurion for years and his status as a businessman is well-known by security.

On one particular trip, airport security escorted Edward to a backroom. He asked why this was necessary. He received no answer. Guards stood nearby as security officers strip-searched him, invading every cavity and exploring every stitch of clothing, even turning up his collar and feeling along the seam. Edward speaks perfect Hebrew and said, "Look me in the eye when you do this. Treat me like a human being. You have absolutely no reason to harass me like this. I have come to this airport for many many years. What is so suspicious about me?"

Simply protocol, one of the officers responded.

When security finished, Edward picked up his cane. He contracted polio as a child, before the vaccination was readily available, and he walks with a pronounced limp. He followed the officials back into the expansive main terminal where hundreds of passengers filed through metal detectors and baggage checks. Suddenly Edward stopped.

"You forgot something,” he said as airport personnel turned to face him. “You didn't check my cane."

He tapped his cane on the floor between them.

They assured him they were quite satisfied. He was free to go. But Edward adamantly refused.

"No, you must check my cane,” he said, his voice rising. “It could have a bomb! You checked everything else. Why would you not check it?"

Security said it would be unnecessary.

“But if it is protocol to strip-search me, why would you not search this?” Edward yelled, shoving his cane toward them. “If I deserved that, then surely you must make certain I do not have a bomb!”

His loud voice began drawing attention from the terminal. Curious passengers and passersby watched as the guards attempted to usher Edward to the front of the line, but he shrugged them off.

"I insist you check my cane! I could have a bomb in this cane! You must check it now!"

The security officers finally took Edward’s cane and scanned it before letting him pass through. He didn’t have a bomb.

Transition . . .

2010-04-05T11:18:00.003-05:00

I'm back in the United States. I arrived a week ago, returning a month earlier than originally expected. The transition is difficult, in the midst of wide spaces and abundance and nonexistence of checkpoints and machine guns. I feel overwhelmed and unsettled.

I am in Searcy, Arkansas, at the moment where I have been basking in reunions with my family here. I flew into the States on Monday and the following days I enjoyed being with my parents and younger sister; I had been gone a long time! I leave today for Nashville, where I will hear one of my favorite authors and thinkers, Peter Rollins, speak tonight and will spend the week with my brother, speaking in a few classes at Lipscomb about Israel and Palestine. Unfortunately, I will be missing John Caputo speaking in Arkansas!!!!

The last few weeks in the Middle East were extremely busy for me with packing and filming and guests and goodbyes. To the faithful few who peruse this blog, I apologize for my lack of dedication. I have approximately twenty pages of notes for stories in a Microsoft Word document which I hope to develop and craft over the ensuing weeks and months. I have stories I want to share and thoughts I want to explore, for myself and with others. In the possible future, they will find their way here . . .

Kenosis, Khora, and the Prejudice of Love

2010-03-06T05:41:00.002-06:00

I’ve thought a lot about how I could articulate my “theology,” which may not be the best word because by that word I mean my way of life. Or rather: what I want it to be. Maybe I could begin to express it with these words: a particular incarnation of kenosis, khora, and the prejudice of love. Narrative is the best way to communicate such thoughts, something I am feebly hinting toward in stories like “A Mighty Stream,” “The Thousand Worlds,” and “The Almond Tree.” I think truth happens in poetry and parables, not in abstracted theological musings, as necessary as they may be. The thoughts to follow come out of my unfinished story and my encounter with other stories. Because of this, these words must be seen as an extremely shallow explication, because these words can and must be expanded upon, given more depth to. After the wheat has been separated from the chaff, which is a never-ending process, theology must be rooted in this: love God, love others. These are inseparably one, and, for me, the same. Jesus said these simple, complex, and life-giving/threatening words summed up his entire religious tradition and sacred scriptures. “How do I love when I love my God?” asks John Caputo, practically tweaking Augustine, “for love is a how, not a what. And so is God . . . Love is not a meaning to define, but something to do, something to make . . . ‘God’- that is not only a name but an injunction, an invitation, a solicitation, to commend, to let all things be commended, to God.”

I have been tempted to erase everything that follows because, sometimes, such musings actually do feel unnecessary because who I am is not what I say I believe. Who I am is what I do. Theology that isn’t love and doesn’t lead to love is worthless, and should be thrown into the fire. Because everything else is straw.

Incarnation is the beginning because theory must reside within praxis, from the root of experience, and be livable. Theology, which is theory and praxis, must be birthed from experience, thought, and interaction with others. To incarnate something is to put it into flesh, into life and action. This incarnation is particular because the active enfleshing and therefore enacting of this way of life must make sense within a specific context and community. Particularity, which does not imply exclusivity but rather the opposite, means that incarnation is subject to the place in which the event of incarnation occurs. And particularity implicitly recognizes that incarnation is extraordinarily and irreducibly diverse and created through dialogue.

The Greek word kenosis, in Christian theology, means “self-emptying,” stemming from Paul’s recitation of a hymn in Ephesians 2:5-11. Kenosis is arguably the most unique aspect of Christianity: the Father self-emptied into the Son, who emptied himself for his own small corner of the world (a particularity which achieves universality), and of whom his followers are to be imitators. In this way, identity is not based on the self but is found by losing yourself, by emptying yourself for others. The way of kenosis is the way of death, of letting go, expressed in such aphorisms as “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all”; “Whoever wishes to save his life must first lose it”; and “Take up your cross and follow.” Kenosis is deeply sacrificial, allowing oneself to be deconstructed in order to become khora.

The Greek word khora is the open space for infinite possibility. Khora is the sacred place of incarnation; Mary has been called khora ton arkoretou which means “the container of the uncontainable.” In this sense the most religious word, as Caputo says, is “Yes,” which assents to the inviting, whispering call, a power without force, and opens to become like a womb. Khora is not being or nonbeing, but is an open space for the event/spirit of God to break through the confining name/concept of God. Khora is where, as Meister Eckhart prayed, God can be rid of God. Kenosis leads to khora, which is where death can lead to the possibility of rebirth into a ‘new’ way of seeing the world.

And this ‘new’ defining hermeneutic is the prejudice of love for the other. This rebirth gives new eyes to see the world, as Bonhoeffer said, “from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.” This way is prejudiced by a love for the poor and poor in spirit and unequivocally calls for justice, which is the body and flesh of the soul and spirit of love. The prejudice of love is the self-emptying of oneself into the world for the least of these.

This conversion never stops. This is a constant resurrecting journey. And a particular incarnation of kenosis, khora, and the prejudice of love inevitably leads to a cross.

A Prayer: May we be emptied of ourselves to become open spaces for the im/possible event of You that breaks through the confining concept of God, and breathes life. May we respond to the weak whispering call of justice, mercy, and commitment. And may we be resurrected by and to a way of life that is prejudiced by a love for the poor and the poor in spirit. Amen, Let it be . . .

The Thousand Worlds

2010-03-02T04:08:00.003-06:00

Several weeks ago, Paul finished a three-month stint with the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, which is actually in Bethlehem. ARIJ is a Palestinian NGO that promotes local solutions to local problems through sustainable development, renewable energy, and control of natural resources. During our first month here, however, Paul volunteered with Bethlehem Bible College. He spent most of his time in the gift shop, sorting through orders and taping price tags onto expensive souvenirs. On numerous occasions, he drove the BBC van to the airport in order to pick up employees or important guests. And for several Sundays, Paul stealthily drove the president of the Bible College and his wife to the Baptist church in East Jerusalem. West Bank Palestinians must have special permits in order to cross through checkpoints, which the president and his wife are not able to get. The president’s brother was one of Palestine’s most prominent nonviolent leaders who organized numerous boycotts against Israeli authorities before he was permanently deported. Patrick and I joined Paul one Sunday because a free ride to Jerusalem is hard to pass up, and we all planned on traveling to Ramallah in the afternoon.

Even with the free ride, I was hesitant. I was hesitant because I have an extreme discomfort in churches, and have long ceased regular attendance. I don’t feel called there. My family was, in some respects, aggressively encouraged to leave the Christian tradition from which we came. My dad believed in the necessity of questioning everything, including God. Not everyone agreed, and he was denied the ability to speak publicly and teach classes because, they said, “The church doesn’t need to change; it’s fine the way it is.” We were pushed into a corner until our only place within the community was passive compliance. My parents decided that it was time to excommunicate ourselves. For years, we visited almost every imaginable Christian denomination, which is how I learned about ecumenism and the education of difference. I also learned that the church is not housed in buildings but is housed as people.

As I grew older, I grew more disillusioned with church. Admittedly, the pool of churches into which my family dove was a shallow sample in the American South. But that sampling left a bitter taste in my mouth and many Sunday mornings I have found myself gasping for breath. Church can devolve into a sanitary and secluded place where people cathartically unleash their frustrations at the state of the world without ever going out to change it. Church activities can actually perpetuate injustice. The pressure valves are released and the constrained steam dissipates and fuels nothing. We have made our contribution, everything is certain, we have arrived, we are comforted. We’ve had our reassuring catharsis and the world stays as is.

All of this, it must be said, can apply just as equally to social outreach, a bloodless phrase that almost implies separation. People unleash their frustrations at the way the world is, dishing out fish instead of asking why so many people aren’t allowed access to the pond. We have made our contribution, and we are comforted. I am also fully aware that many churches do not fit these descriptions. Shared meals, rituals, and accountability are all vital. And I know that true change can and does occur beneath steeples. The church is a whore, but she has also given birth to some of the world’s most devoted servants. Good and bad exist in every religious tradition and ignoring one while uplifting the other is unfairly naïve. Unfortunately, my experience has tended toward the more ugly side.

I don’t think I have felt resentment toward the people, though I have certainly resented much of the espoused ideology. My discomfort has often been because I don’t know how to communicate. I speak a different language. When I speak and think, I draw on different vocabulary, and I struggle with meaningful translation between how I speak and how many churches speak. Some of my friends are fluent in both, like effortlessly speaking English and Arabic, or Hebrew. I feel mute. We all have holes, many churches say, and we need God to fill the hole in our lives. But I don’t believe God, whatever that means, fills the hole. I resonate with Frederick Buechner’s words: “If we cannot believe in God as a noun, maybe we can still believe in God as a verb. And the verb that God is, is transitive, it takes an object, and the object of the verb that God is, is the world. To love, to judge, to heal, to give Christs to. The world. The thousand thousand worlds.” I believe God is the hole.

Paul parked the van within the gated courtyard of the church. I thought I might sit outside beneath an olive tree, maybe read or sit in silence. My discomfort with church may sometimes be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I would still prefer to sit under an open sky with branches above my head. Paul needed help carrying boxes of plastic cups inside from a car, so I stacked a few and turned the corner to the front door. As I walked up the steps, I noticed an old Muslim woman hobbling toward me through the gate. Her back was bent and she leaned heavily against a knotted cane. The old woman looked around warily and saw me watching her. I said good morning in Arabic, sabah al-khair, and invited her to sit on the steps. She asked for water and I tossed the boxes inside, filled one of the cups at the cooler, and joined her on the cracking stairs.

The old woman sipped delicately. Her heavy black clothes were stained and the scarf around her head was damp with sweat. Her teeth were rotting yellow and brown. She had a few whiskers around her upper lip, drops of water clinging to their ends. Her rough face looked like it had been carved out of crumbling wood, and her skin was wrinkled like ruffled laundry unevenly thrown out to dry. She held the plastic cup in her dark twisted fingers as I sat next to her and Paul sat behind me. She asked if this was a school; someone had told her she could find help here because she needed fifty shekels (around thirteen dollars) to buy a bus ticket to Ramallah and to pay for a doctor’s appointment for stomach problems. It’s not a school, I answered, it’s a church. But surely we could find someone here to help. Paul immediately jumped up and ran inside to find someone. The old woman told me she was from Bethany, born to a German Christian mother and a Palestinian Muslim father. She was like her father, she said. Bethany is on the other side of the Wall. I didn’t know how she got into Jerusalem or why she didn’t just go to Ramallah through the West Bank. As we sat on the steps I could hear people singing hymns. The church service had started. The sound bounced around the inside of the walls.

Paul soon returned with a prominent leader from a Christian college. He knelt down on the top step, several feet away from her, and spoke a few words in Arabic. Then he tossed two coins in her lap and hurried back inside. She looked up at me and the lines around her eyes looked like deep-set trails of tears.
“Oh,” she murmured, almost inaudibly. “He only gave me ten shekels.”

Everything outside was silent for a moment, but I could still hear music in the walls. I offered to walk her to the bus station, but she refused because she had to stop by a friend’s house to get her prescription for the medication. I didn’t really know if her story was true. I had no reason to doubt her. She had a legitimate answer to every question. Either way, she obviously needed money and she needed help. The smallest bill I had in my wallet was more than she needed, but I handed it to her. Shukran, she said with her head bowed, thank you. Then she stood and her body trembled as she struggled to rise. She turned and walked away like an old church, a frail object of a transitive verb.

Paul and I sat in the back pew. The guest pastor was an enthusiastic Australian, neatly-trimmed and well-dressed with a beaming white smile. His sermon was about suffering. We suffer, he said, for glory. Glory is the reward for suffering! But in the midst of suffering we must keep our eyes on God! and he pointed emphatically toward the ceiling. And the way we keep our eyes on God in suffering is through prayer, singing praises, and memorizing the Bible. Then we can persevere! Now we wear a crown of thorns, but one day we will trade it in for a crown of gold!

Patrick, Paul, and I sat quietly in the small atrium as everyone filed out of the sanctuary. My feet swished on the flowered tiles and left comet-shaped patterns of dust. When the last person exited to the foyer for snacks, Paul moved to the bench in front of the Baldwin piano. His fingers moved over the keys and, closing his eyes, he started to sing: “I am a whore I do confess/But I put you on just like a wedding dress/And I run down the aisle.” Patrick and I felt the piano reverberating through the floor and we started to sing too. “So could you love this bastard child/Though I don’t trust you to provide/With one hand in a pot of gold/and with the other in your side?” The music and words echoed in the sanctuary and I thought about opening a window so it wouldn’t be trapped in the walls. Paul began to sing louder. “I am so easily satisfied/By the call of lovers so less wild/That I would take a little cash/Over your very flesh and blood.” And then our voices simultaneously lowered almost to whispers, and the clear notes of the piano softly filled the room. “I’m a prodigal with no way home/But I put you on like a ring of gold/And I run down the aisle/Run down the aisle to you.”

The last notes lingered and I wondered if one of the thousand worlds had safely arrived in Ramallah.

Musalaha

2010-02-28T09:46:00.002-06:00

The wind is howling against the house, and I can hear it creaking in response. Rain is pouring down and it patters against the water tank on the roof. All I see is gray through the windows, a perfect day for a cup of tea next to the fireplace. This may be the last big rain of the season. The land needs it.

Friday was my last day with Musalaha after almost six months of work. I still think it strange that I have been here that long, and even stranger that those six months disappeared so quickly. My last day was spent stuffing newsletters into envelopes and enjoying a meal with the Israeli and Palestinian staff. Over lunch, Ryan, another volunteer who finished that day, and I participated in a quiz in which we were presented with awkward quotes said by Musalaha’s director, guessing to whom he said it and what he meant by it. This workplace is the perfect basis for a new version of The Office.

The past six months have been challenging, frustrating, and nourishing. Nourishing because I have developed several meaningful friendships; frustrating because I have seen an NGO handcuffed because of a desire to appease exceedingly conflicting groups; and challenging because in many instances I have extremely divergent ways of embracing God and the world, because I have been challenged by the complex relationships of the Israelis and Palestinians with whom I interacted, and because I have felt those same handcuffs on my wrists. Perhaps my most difficult challenge has been working with editors in an organization who have different standards than my own. And this experience has also been nourishing because it has forced me to rethink and reword some of my writing. All writers squirm when people stab a red pen onto their pages. I agreed with some changes to strongly-phrased statements or to factual inaccuracies, but the greatest challenge came when I felt like the quality, mood, and message of the stories were altered. Controversial statements made by the interviewees were deleted and gentler words took their place. In the midst of my frustration I recognize that Musalaha attempts to walk a string-thin line. They are in an extremely volatile situation as a non-profit organization funded mostly by Evangelical Christians, many of whom still ardently sympathize with Israel. The director says he has “an itch for justice” and is ready for Musalaha to speak more. But if they cry justice too loudly, most Israelis won’t come. But if Musalaha continues a more neutral stance on political issues, Palestinians will consider their stance as normalizing the Occupation and they may not come much longer either.

When I first arrived, I was asked to write stories about people struggling in the tension of this conflict. Through the editing process, however, some of the stories have become more sentimental accounts of Musalaha’s success. Some of those interviewed were concerned with their depiction. Some were angered by what I recorded them saying; but, interestingly, most asked for changes because I described them washing dishes, talking about family, twirling a candle on the table. One lady asked us to remove her story because of my literary descriptions. At the end of the day, I was told, these people determine what form of their story is published and if it will be published. If this book was journalistic, written outside of Musalaha, expectations would be different. But Musalaha feels forced to primarily consider support and involvement. I am glad I don’t have to make those decisions.

I hope to write a longer post about my experience with Musalaha. I have copied below the introduction to the almost-completed book, which will probably be published later this year. I have used some of my own words from previous stories on this blog:

“You have heard it said . . . but I tell you . . .”

These are some of the most life-threatening, and life-giving, words I’ve ever heard. They strip me of my securities, they rob me of my comforts, they take away my preconceptions. They tear down my strongly-held religious and political convictions. They tell me to look, not higher, but deeper, toward the heart, toward my heart, toward others’ hearts, toward the heart of reality. They tell me that deconstruction is an act of love. Jesus disturbs our settled words because he tells us of a radical kind of God; radical in the more common meaning of “revolutionary,” but also in the Latin origin which means “to the root.” Radicalizing is more important than liberalizing.

These words tell me to look again. Without that respect, which means “to look again” in Latin, we will not see.

I came to volunteer with Musalaha for six months, beginning in September 2009 through the end of February 2010. Between September and December, I conducted approximately thirty interviews with people, Israeli and Palestinian, who are involved with the organization. I traveled from Jerusalem to Haifa, from Bethlehem to Nazareth, meeting in coffee shops and offices and homes, asking a few questions to serve as a framework and allowing the conversation to evolve from there. For the next several months, I incarnated my skeletal notes as stories about encounters with ‘the other’ and events of reconciliation. The project was not a comprehensive biographical endeavor; I had only one interview with each person. Because of that, I am not completely satisfied with all the stories, which is inevitable when writing. Interviews in coffee shops and homes, divorced from action and interaction, provide a limited palette of descriptive hues. And this project was not an attempt to relate the history of the conflict. Much better and more educated people have dealt very extensively with that subject. These stories were meant to be small windows into the ongoing transformation of specific people.

Some stories are short, some are longer, and some are told together because the accounts were marked by a specific encounter with each other. In each story, I gave the last word to the main character. I certainly do not agree with or condone every perspective shared, but this book was not intended to explicitly counter each disconcerting point of view. These stories are an attempt at conversation, allowing different thoughts and opinions to unsettle and unhinge our own thoughts and opinions. To at least make us look again. Tensions are preserved and several of the endings seem abrupt because those tensions have not all been resolved. Transformation is a never-ending journey.

Not every reference to history or to current events is factual. Those interviewed were speaking from memory, without reference to verifiable sources. They, like all of us, speak out of their framing stories which provide legitimacy for why we think, feel, and act the way we do. We need framing stories. We cannot help having them, but we can help which ones we live out. We need a new one that speaks of justice, reconciliation, and peace. And the first step is to open ourselves to listening to the stories of others.

National defense strategies and political resolutions have never created true peace. They cannot. Oppressive systems and extremist violence must be confronted, but if people are still tied to the destructive mindsets that engendered these violent systems, then little will be changed, and the brutal cycle will continue. Maybe the way to overcome the oppressive political and societal systems is to dismantle the racial prejudices and uninformed worldviews held fearfully by so many people. To transform hearts. Many would say this is foolishly naïve. And it is. “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” Like Hercules fighting the Hydra monster, we can chop down the countless destructive systems forever, because they will always grow back like biting heads unless the people in the systems rethink everything. We can only ignore the source for so long.

I hold no illusions of being or wanting to be a politician, at least not in the typical sense. I have no grand theories or clever schemes that if implemented will end this turmoil. I want to be a storyteller; I have stories I want to tell because I foolishly believe in their transforming power. There will be no peace without conversion through reconciliation and justice. I do not mean justice characterized as “getting what you deserve,” justice as the antecedent to “the American way,” or justice as an “eye for an eye.” The Holocaust cannot justify the Nakba and the Occupation; the Nakba does not justify suicide bombings and rockets. In the Jewish worldview, peace, shalom, is not the absence of difference or disagreement, but it is the presence of the wholeness of God. Justice is about rehumanization, because justice, as Dr. Cornel West says, “is what love looks like in public.” The Arabic word translated as “goodbye” is ma’a salaama, but a friend once told me that it literally means “with health,” and comes from the same root as the word for “peace,” salaam. Peace is healing, and healing brings wholeness. Justice is the arrival of that healing presence which washes away oppression and dehumanization and conquest; and mercy and compassion always flow within the mighty stream of true justice.

Frederick Buechner wrote that “In Hebrew the term dabar means both ‘word’ and ‘deed.’ Thus to say something is to do something . . . Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.”

Words and actions create stories and stories create meaning. Stories say something and do something. May these stories create an open space for the sacred event of what seems like the impossible to happen, because stories not only describe reality, they transform it. They tell us to keep looking again.

Greece

2010-02-19T02:57:00.002-06:00

I am in the land of gods and goddesses, temples and monasteries, bazoukis and kalamari. My family and I lived in Greece for the first half of 2001 while my dad took a sabbatical from work as a doctor in the Appalachian mountains. I was also here in 2008, backpacking on my way to U.S. after a summer working in Ramallah. Patrick and Paul both studied here during a semester abroad program with our university.

The Harding group travels out from Greece during their semester, and they came through Israel and Palestine last week. We met them in Bethlehem and showed them around Beit Sahour, taking them to the Al-Basma Center and our house for a slideshow presentation briefly summarizing history, current events, and the humanitarian crisis in Israel and occupied Palestine. Our second visa was approaching expiration, so we decided to accept an invitation to join them in Greece. We arrived here on Tuesday, on the same flight as the Harding group, and came with them to the old hotel-turned-campus in Porto Rafti, on the east coast of Greece. We've spent the past few days hiking through the green hills and long the clear coastline. And it's been incredibly refreshing and in-spiring. I will probably write a more detailed story about Greece at some point, but I have abundant notes for so many stories that I haven't been able to flesh out yet. I was hoping this trip would provide me with that opportunity, but green and slopes and the beach are calling much more enticingly.

Our return flight is this coming Tuesday, and then exactly two months left in the land between the river and the sea . . .

Brian McLaren and Israel/Palestine

2010-02-14T10:42:00.004-06:00

Brian McLaren and a group of artists and writers recently visited Israel and Palestine. I was able to meet McLaren in Bethlehem. We have been occasionally corresponding since last summer, discussing a documentary some friends of mine and I will begin filming in a month and a possible meeting with him when he came here. Unfortunately we only had about five minutes to visit when we actually met face-to-face.

McLaren has written fairly extensively about the Middle East, and has handled it exceptionally well. However, some of the comments on his recent posts have been less than cordial, and less than equitable. Which isn't unexpected at all. McLaren has responded to these tirades with extreme humility, clarity, and assertiveness. I have a great amount of respect for the careful way in which he dealt with such volatile conversations.

You can check it out here: http://www.brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/responses-to-my-palestine-posts.html

Phone Call

2010-02-06T13:52:00.000-06:00

I heard a muffled ring, and my pant’s pocket trembled. My phone is hard to hear even without the cloth barrier, so I also have it on vibrating mode. I purchased the phone before coming here through Israel Phones, a company that caters to tourists, students, and backpackers in the so-called Holy Land. I’ve used the company before, and the call rates are fairly inexpensive. The silver-colored face is chipping and the phone number, super-glued to the light blue backing, is peeling off. Partly why it’s inexpensive.

I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered anyway.
“Hello,” said a cheerful female voice on the other end. “Is this Jonathan McRay? I’m calling from Israel Phones.”
“Oh,” I said, without the cheer.
They’ve called many times since I’ve been here, so I knew why they were calling again.
“We just wanted to confirm that you were still in possession of your phone, that it has not been lost or stolen.”
“Why is that?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.
“Several 059 numbers have been dialed, which is a settlement-area number. Did you mean to call these numbers?”

059 numbers are Palestinian numbers, and apparently the only reason I would call a Palestinian is . . . well, there isn’t a reason, because my phone must have been either lost or stolen. Presumably by a Palestinian, because otherwise a 059 number would not have been dialed. And Palestinians apparently now live in the settlement-area. This is quickly coming true. Illegal settlements are spreading through the choking West Bank like an infection, exterior signs of a colonialist epidemic. The land wears sackcloth and ashes from its burning olive trees as the existing sores continue to spread and new ones break out.

“Yes I did,” I replied somewhat tersely. Perhaps too tersely. I recognized that this representative probably didn’t implement the prejudiced policies. But I was angry.
“I see,” said the cheerful female voice a little less cheerfully and a little more cautiously. “And will you be dialing these numbers again in the future.”
“Yes I will,” I responded.
A brief pause followed.
“Oh-oh,” she stuttered. The cheer was gone. “I see. Well then, have a nice day.”

No Words

2010-02-02T02:43:00.007-06:00

I couldn't think of a title for this. Nothing really works. These links are to videos and stories concerning Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. At some point, I'm going to write a story about my limited experience there. Last year, several Palestinian families were evicted from their generational homes so that Jewish settlers could move into the houses, part of an ongoing colonialism. The old Arab homes are now covered in Israeli flags and police and military are constantly present. Members of the Palestinian families now live on the street in tents to protest, but homelessness is conveniently illegal in Jerusalem. These people have been kicked out of their homes so that Jerusalem can be more Jewish. I have no words. Only nausea and tears. And little hope, because I don't know what hope is in these situations.

The Palestinian man with the big black beard is Nasser Gawi. He was kicked out the home in which he was born. And he lives on the street now. I've met him and talked with him. Here is the description of the video: "After verbal taunting, a settler in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah left the Gawi house which he and other settlers have occupied since August 2009. He descended the stairs with an M-16 and pushed a teenage boy. When neighborhood adults stepped in to protect the teenager, he pushed Nasser Gawi and then punched him. Seconds later the settler cocked his M-16 and pointed it wildly at the crowd that had gathered. In this video you can clearly see the first punch thrown by the settler and clearly hear the cock of his gun."

And here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_noYAfW7dm4

The second link is to a story about Sheikh Jarrah on the Palestine Monitor. Scroll down to the video that appears under 'Apathy and Dissent.' The video is of the nonviolent protests, led mostly by Israeli activists, that oppose the occupation of the Palestinian homes. I've attended one of these protests. The two men shouting throughout the video are also Israelis. Not everyone supports justice and peace and recognition of humanity.

Here is the link to the story: http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article1247

And the Muslim

2010-01-26T02:28:00.004-06:00

When I finish for the day at the Musalaha office, I catch Bus 124 to the checkpoint. After quickly presenting my passport, I walk across a small empty parking lot and through the Wall. A hive of taxis constantly swarms like massive yellow bees around the point where the Wall severs Hebron Road. I’ve become friends with several of the taxi drivers, and they begin shouting greetings when they see me walking through the grated tunnel. They call me Hanna, Arabic for John, and they make sure every other driver gives me a fair price. He is a friend, they tell them, so do not cheat him.

Of all the taxi drivers, I’ve become closest to Walid. He first gave me a ride several months ago, before our first visa renewal trip to Jordan. Walid drove me all over Bethlehem looking for a bank that would give me Jordanian dinar. Now, he drives me near my house almost every time I come back to Bethlehem from the office. Most of the other drivers yell and beg, urging me toward their open doors. But Walid stands in the back with his hands in his pockets, a confident smile on his bearded face because he knows I’ll ride with him.

Not long ago, I came back early from the office. I’ve begun doing that much more frequently in the past few weeks. I write much better from the house. As I walked down to the buzzing taxis, I heard people calling my name and I saw Walid standing tall next to a fruit stand, a thick strand of dark hair curling naturally across his forehead. Before I had time to acknowledge him, he climbed into his car and waited for me to join.

“Marhaba, Hanna,” he said after I closed the door. “Keyf halak? How are you?
“Ah tamam, okay,” I said, setting my backpack between my feet. “Inta? You?
“Kowaies, kowaies,” he replied, speedily maneuvering the taxi within an inch of pedestrians and other cars. “Good, good.”

We drove out of the pocket formed by the Wall’s horseshoe-curve and soon turned down to Beit Sahour at a large roundabout built for the pope’s visit. A long line of clothing stores rushed by on the left, and behind them, across the valley, the Israeli settlement of Har Homa reached like a white hand over a once-forested hill. Trash swirled from the sidewalks and got sucked under our tires. Walid rotated the steering wheel with one broad brown hand, the other propped through the open window. He told me he was getting more and more excited with each passing day: his pregnant wife was expecting their first baby in less than a month. They had only been married for ten months, and apparently wasted absolutely no time in starting their family. Mabruk, I said to him. Congratulations. And he said Hamdullah, hamdulillah, praise be to God.

“Walid,” I said, watching the road bend in front of us so that I could see my house on a distant hill, “are you Muslim or Christian?” I didn’t hesitate in asking, because the strange Western taboo on discussing religion and politics doesn’t really exist here.
“Ana?” he asked, slightly turning his head toward me, but keeping his eyes straight ahead. “Me? I am Muslim.”
“Are you very religious?”
“Shu? What?”
“Do you fast or go to the mosque to pray?”
Walid clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth.
“Believe me, very very little,” he said. “Maybe I go after.”
He laughed and added, “After one month, one year, who knows?”
“Lesh?” I asked. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Ma ba’raf. I don’t know.”

All around the hills and valleys, minarets pointed up like dozens of antennas searching for a heavenly signal. Several times a day, numerous calls to prayer from numerous mosques reverberate from every direction, overlapping like echoes in a still cave. I told Walid that there are almost as many mosques here as there are churches in East Tennessee, where I’m from. Steeples of some persuasion rise out of almost every street corner in Jellico, the little town in the Appalachian Mountains where I grew up. He asked if there were any mosques in East Tennessee. Not in Jellico, I said.

I told him I had heard of animosity between Muslims and Christians in the Bethlehem area. Walid looked at me with inquisitive eyes.
“Weyn? Where?”
“In Beit Jala mostly. This is what I’ve heard. Have you felt this?”
Walid looked surprised and shook his head, sticking out his lower lip.
“No,” and he rubbed his forefingers together and said, “We are brothers.”

The guys and I sometimes buy groceries from a small store partially underground, in a side alley in the old city of Beit Sahour. During one shopping venture, Patrick and Paul struck up a conversation with the shopkeeper, who said he was Christian. Patrick said we are here to help make justice and peace, adaala and salaam, in whatever small way we can. The Christian shopkeeper then said, If it weren’t for the Muslims we would not have all these violent problems. Patrick and Paul were stunned. Well, Patrick slowly began, maybe Christians and Muslims should all be working together to end what they both share in common, the Israeli Occupation. No no, the shopkeeper interrupted, the Muslims are the cause of all these problems. They always have been. In every sermon, the Muslims preach destruction of Christianity. And the Crusades didn’t even happen. The Crusades are Islamic propaganda to turn Christians into the bad guys and to give Muslims an excuse to persecute Christians. No, he insisted, Muslims are the real problem and the real enemy.

“Shu inta?” Walid asked. “Ortodox? Latin?”
I shrugged. “Ma ba’raf.”
He laughed, and nodded.
“I was raised as Christian,” I continued. “But I have many problems with Christianity. There can be many bad things.”
He nodded in acknowledgement, his face turning serious.
“But, I do feel called by the way of Issa the prophet, who said to love your enemies.”
Walid put his hand over his heart and looked at me and said, “Issa, Muhammad, Musa, all this I believe.”
“Yes,” I said, and I put my hand over my heart, and in that moment we seemed like we were pledging allegiance.
“Issa and the prophets teach and live love and justice, and this is what I believe. They teach to serve the poor and the sick, the Jew and the Christian and . . .”
He broke in: “And the Muslim!”
“Yes, and the Muslim, sahibi.”
Walid shook my hand with a firm slap.
“Hamdullah.”

Let Freedom Ring

2010-01-19T01:57:00.010-06:00

"We are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

Yesterday was Martin Luther King, JR Day. Dr. King was a prophet who spoke to the particularity of his experience and the oppressed experience of his people in the United States. But his words do not just belong to the Civil Rights Movement of the United States. Exactly through his particularity, exactly because he spoke to his small corner of the world, his message has achieved a universality that speaks to everyone, everywhere. And Dr. King paid for his words and his actions with his life. He paid for his cry for justice and nonviolence and recogniition of humanity. He paid, because the adherents to the religion of empire know their enemies. They know those who house events capable of shattering violence, hatred, and exclusive ideologies. Those who can change their situation, and thus the world. Those who sow the seeds of liberation, justice, and peace must be prepared to find a cross, or a bullet, down the road. And even if those seeds may never grow, even if they fall on rocky ground or are choked by weeds, they are still worth sowing and that message is still worth announcing even though it might never be realized. Because "a time comes when silence is betrayal.” Perhaps announcing, and living that announcement, is the fullest realization we can expect. Dr. King walked in the blazing footsteps of the prophets and prophetesses who sang and danced before him. Now, let's go after them.

"I have a dream that one day on the pallid hills of Israel and Palestine the sons of soldiers and the sons of suicide bombers will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood . . .

I have a dream that one day even the State of Israel, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice . . .

I have a dream that one day, down in Hebron, with its vicious settlers, and in Gaza with its rocket-launchers, who all have their lips dripping with the words of terror and expulsion; one day right there in Jerusalem, little Palestinian boys and Palestinian girls will be able to join hands with little Israeli boys and Israeli girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the breath that fills us all shall be revealed, and all flesh shall breathe it together . . .

And if the world is to be healed and made whole, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the ashen hilltops of the occupied West Bank. Let freedom ring from the desert places of the Negev. Let freedom ring from the fertile valleys of the Galilee!

Let freedom ring from the cosmopolitan streets of Tel Aviv!

Let freedom ring from the open-air prison of Gaza!

But not only that; let freedom ring from the fear-ravaged homes in Sderot!

Let freedom ring from the Temple Mount, from Haram ash-Sharif, in Jerusalem!

Let freedom ring from every ghetto and every city in the Middle East. From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every synagogue and every mosque, from every country and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims and Christians and everyone, yes, everyone else, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

A Mighty Stream

2010-01-17T05:32:00.004-06:00

The students pushed their way into the bursting van, pressing their faces against the windows and waving as they disappeared around the gate. Patrick, Paul, and I grabbed our backpacks from the office, said bye to Basma and the remaining teachers, and started the long trudge uphill to our house. I slapped my knees to knock off caked dirt; we spent most of the afternoon pulling weeds around the budding cucumber plants. The road from the Al-Basma Center threaded through the old clustered homes, stacking upwards in layers and rising like artificial hills. Patrick said we didn’t have any more pita, so we cut over a gravelly embankment to a large grocery store on Wad Abu Sada, the street that runs to the foot of our jabal, hill. We have to buy pita and hoummus every few days, because in our house they evaporate with each meal.

I stood on the front steps while Patrick and Paul went inside. I hate shopping; perusing through used bookstores doesn’t count. Admittedly, I get too easily irritated with shopping, but when I need something from the store, I go in, find what I came for, buy it, and leave. Patrick and Paul like to browse, deliberating over every different brand of an item. So I let them browse, instead opting to wait outside. No sense in intentionally ruffling my own feathers.

Several kids ran up the gradual incline of the street, kicking a deflated soccer ball. I sat on the steps, my head resting on my knees. I was tired, but not necessarily from ripping weeds. This place tired me. I was tired of sarcastic teenagers howling profanities in English when I walked past, tired of seeing six-year-old boys playing with toy M-16s, tired of the incessant discord of car horns at any stall in traffic, tired of passing through checkpoints every morning to sit in an office in an industrial zone, tired of feeling like I wasn’t doing what I came here to do. I was tired of feeling like I wasn’t making any difference. I wasn’t naïve enough to come here thinking that the Occupation would end during this eight months. But I was drained, and the exhaustion agitated me.

I was concerned, too. There is a fine line between confronting dehumanization and dehumanizing those you confront. I have to take sides, because neutrality is voting for the oppressor. That fine line is a tightrope that must be walked. But I’ve never been convinced that joining the oppressed and actively condemning injustice mean that I must see the oppressors as something other than what I am. People dehumanize themselves with violence and hatred, but I don’t have to encourage them. I was concerned, because I don’t want to trip over the razor-edge of that line. For a lot of activists, I’ve noticed, that line is nonexistent: the other side deserves to be dehumanized, because they’ve forfeited their humanity by their actions. A love of justice isn’t always wedded to a love of the breath that fills us all. Because the others aren’t breathing the same air. They couldn’t be. The soldiers who come to villages in the middle of night to beat and arrest protest leaders don’t breathe the same way I do. Fanatical settlers drive Palestinians out of their generational homes in East Jerusalem, where homelessness is coincidentally illegal, and they can’t be like me. I’m nothing like the teenaged military recruits, away from homes and schools for the first time, pumped full of fear and nationalism and the need for defense. And I have nothing in common with citizens who praise the heroism of their armed forces, with government leaders who think strength and war will make peace, with adherents to exclusive religious ideologies, with families who go about their normal lives, intentionally or unintentionally oblivious about what their money supports or the costs of their allegiances. I could never be made to believe that my country was God-ordained, that my nation was morally superior, that my humanity was more important. I could never be made to believe such propaganda.

I looked up at the sky, and suddenly the dark clouds opened into light-laced holes and rain poured down. I jumped up the steps to the patio underneath the balcony that formed an awning. Dust spread like steam as the raindrops hit the pavement. The drenched kids abandoned their soccer ball and danced through the street, laughing with heads up in the air and fingers pointing to the leaking sky. The old man on the patio next to me took off his glasses and whispered “Hamdullah. Thanks to God.” Grayish white-water rapids turned the corner and rushed down the scarred streets. Waves lapped over one another and carried stones and pebbles that somersaulted with the rolling tide, singing like a Native American rainmaker. I cupped my hand and held it out beneath the fresh cascades. Raindrops splashed on my fingertips and trickled down the lines of my palm like a tributary.

Walter Wink wrote: “Every drop of water in me has been in every spring, stream, river, lake, and ocean in the world during our earth’s billions of years of existence. We are related to every other self in the universe.”

I’ve heard that justice, like water, rolls down like a mighty stream. Maybe that’s because they both give us our humanity back. Water and justice announce that we are all related.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T02:34:00.004-06:00

Merry Christmas! I am so sorry I haven't written anything new recently (to those loyal or deluded few who still read these ramblings). I have been busy with my writing project for Musalaha and with wonderful guests for the holiday season. But I hope to write more and post more in the near future. I have so many skeletal notes for stories that have no flesh, bones, or breath yet, but I'm working on en-fleshing and in-spiring them very soon.

“If you believe God was somehow in Christ, it shouldn’t make much difference to you how he got there. If you don’t believe, it should make less difference still. In either case, life is complicated enough without confusing theology and gynecology.”
-Frederick Buechner

Matthew tells of the birth of a new Moses who will lead the people on an exodus out of exile into liberation. Luke tells of the birth of a prophet filled with the spirit who welcomes the diseased and outcasts and marginalized women, and whose radical invitation into a kingdom poses a life-threatening/giving oppostion to the imperial theology of all empires. Welcome, these artists seem to say, to another kind of world where everything is upside down . . .

A Metaphor

2009-12-05T05:42:00.002-06:00

In the Book of John, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” but “the truth” was soon extracted and disembodied. This immaterial “truth” has been enshrined on a high pedestal of intellectual systems, only reachable by those with more advanced cognitive faculties. But Jesus did not say, “I am the abstract absolute moral principle.” Instead, he topples the conceptual idol and proclaims, “I AM the way, the truth, and the life,” which is perhaps less a proclamation and more an invitation . . .

Perhaps “the truth” is embedded in “the way” and “the life” for a reason. To say that a human being is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and not a philosophical concept, implies flesh and blood, sweat and tears, growth and breath. It implies life, a way of life that is deep and dirty and raw. In this understanding, truth is not an ideological list, not the “what” but the “how,” the way itself. Jesus invites those with ears to hear down a narrow path: truth is a way of life, and that cannot be fully expressed, only experienced, like God. Much of what many think of as God cannot be seen in a human being, but Jesus puts skin on the passion and character and vocation of God through his way of life. If the Word of God, this character and passion and vocation, could live a human life, then maybe it would look something like a peasant Jewish carpenter. Jesus incarnates the Spirit that pulses as the heart of reality, constantly redeeming things to that heart: “You have heard it said . . . but I tell you . . .”

And then Jesus disturbs the settled words and tells us of a radical kind of God (radical in the more common meaning of “revolutionary,” but also in the Latin origin which means “to the root”). His words are like water flavored with salt that leaves us always thirsting for more, digging for the hidden treasure buried in the field. Through stories and questions, through metaphors and symbolic actions, Jesus prophetically speaks of a God whose way and kingdom reverse the comfortable order of the powerful, exposing whitewashed tombs and unwashed cups. This is a God of simplicity who cares for the poor in spirit and the poor, who lives in the margins with the sinners and “the least of these,” who burns with righteous anger at injustice and hypocrisy, who feeds the hungry and clothes the naked, who gives water to the thirsty and invites the stranger to the banquet, who gives sight to the blind and heals the lame, who loosens the deadly chains of oppression and sets the captives free, and who loves the unlovable enemies. This is a God of renaissance. And in the end, one that we could almost expect, this image of the in/visible God is abandoned and beaten and nailed to the empire’s tree. “We must appreciate that we are lost before being ‘found’ or being ‘saved’ makes any sense.”

This is no picture of a God who sits on high with sovereign power; this is a picture of a God of transforming powerlessness and weakness who dances in foolishness. The world, in its wisdom, scratches its head in condescending bewilderment, plotting crucifixion and the enthronement of a God of power, domination, and coercion. This is no picture of a God of philosophical abstractions or armchair theologians; this is a picture of a God in the dirt and the mud, a God of sweat and blood who calls for hands and feet. This is a picture of a selfless God of compassion and forgiveness who desires the weightier matters: justice, mercy, and commitment. Jesus plants seeds of good news that turn the world upside-down until, as Caputo says, the world of Alice and Wonderland appears sane in comparison to the kingdom of God. The event of Jesus’ life, his sacramental way of life, is a metaphor for God in flesh and blood. Here is Jesus and the lost-and-found-but-never-quite-found God, because finding is seeking and answering is knocking.

Vacation All Year Round

2009-12-01T07:26:00.005-06:00

I passed through the checkpoint in Bethlehem whenever I went to Musalaha’s office in south Jerusalem. Musalaha, which means ‘reconciliation’ in Arabic, is an organization that brings together Israeli Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians through a shared faith, attempting to dismantle the dividing wall of hostility. My attitude always changed for the worse, toward something like hostility, when I walked through a dividing concrete wall, under metal awnings and heard Hebrew barked over loudspeakers at people who mostly don’t speak Hebrew, and watched old Palestinian men ordered back through the metal detector five times. Countries retain the right to have border control, but the seven hundred Israeli checkpoints are not built on any accepted border. They are on Palestinian land. Almost seventy-five percent of the main roads in the occupied West Bank are controlled, or are completely severed, by checkpoints. The World Bank cites checkpoints as the primary reason for Palestine’s critical economic situation. And the Red Crescent Society has reported one hundred and twelve deaths and thirty-five stillbirths at checkpoints because ambulances were denied permission to cross. And not from Palestine into Israel, but from one part of Palestine to another.

The checkpoint in Bethlehem is on the Jerusalem side of the Israeli separation wall, which splits Hebron Road, the main road between the ancient cities, in two. Countries retain the right to build barriers between themselves and other nations, leaving aside whether or not good fences really do make good neighbors. The United States is building a barrier on the border with Mexico, a debatable representation of “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But the United States is not building that barrier in Mexico, on Mexican land. Over eighty percent of Israel’s twenty-five foot high structure slices into the West Bank, pulling more and more land into Israel. Less than twenty percent is being built on the internationally-accepted Green Line, and none of it is being constructed on Israeli soil. When the good fence cuts into the good neighbor’s yard and annexes the good neighbor’s driveway, water tank, and garden, the claim that the fence is for security becomes suspicious.

The wall cuts off Hebron Road in two places as it curves like a horseshoe, forming a small enclave in between. Every morning, dozens of taxis crowd in crisscrosses beneath the wall’s shadow, waiting to overcharge unsuspecting tourists as they arrive from Jerusalem. A metal fence, like a grated tunnel, runs along the side of the wall’s concrete slabs, now canvases expressing a voice of resistance through a chaotic tapestry of images and words overlaying words. The grated tunnel leads to a door through the wall and into a small fenced area. A small guarded booth and metal detector must be passed before entering a wide parking lot, the threshold of the low-lying roofed checkpoint. Three terminals line the hallway beneath the florescent lights; two are rarely open at a time, no matter how many people are waiting to pass through. And the passing through always takes longer because people in Palestine do not line up for anything. Instead of lines, people form massive stagnant clots; those just entering casually cut and jump to the front and the long line never gets shorter. At least twelve document inspection stations wait on the other side of the metal detectors and conveyor belts and I’ve never seen more than three open at once. All Palestinians must show their special passes that allow them to leave the West Bank and then place their hands on an electronic fingerprint scanner. I can pass through very quickly, flipping my unopened American passport at different windows and pushing through worn-down turnstiles. Usually, the guards barely looked at me and waved me on with a sharp flick of the wrist. Sometimes, soldiers motioned to me to bypass the queue through another gate but I always refused. In some small way I wanted to be with and as the people there, to force myself to experience what they’re experiencing by denying myself the easy option, because I did always have the easy option.

I was on my way to the office on the last Friday of Ramadan. I heard an unusual amount of noise coming from the area next to the wall, and when I came around a fruit stand I saw that every Muslim in the greater Bethlehem area had come that morning to this checkpoint. They had received special passes because of Ramadan to visit the Holy City and pray toward Mecca at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, next to the golden-domed spot where Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven on his horse. The grated tunnel was completely filled, the wired sides almost bulging with the capacity, and every new person squeezing in was like a falling block in Tetris trying to find any available space, except the bottom level in this game didn’t fall away so quickly. Once I got inside I couldn’t get out unless I moved forward with the swarming throng. The noise was deafening as everyone around me was yelling and screaming at one another. Someone climbed up the fence, clambering over people’s heads, and swung toward the front of the horde. A row of weathered Muslim women in hijabs sat in the dust outside the fence and watched as the grated tunnel shook with the pushing and shoving.

I suddenly felt my feet start to lift off the ground as my legs were pushed further apart. I looked down and an old woman on all fours was crawling between my knees. She disappeared between the knees of the next person. I finally got closer to the door in the wall and the small area where soldiers watched through sunglasses beside the armed booth. They started yelling at the disorganized group, attempting to herd them into some kind of line. They tried in vain, because when you dehumanize people to the status of animals, corralling them like cattle through pens and gates and branding them with color-coded IDs, they will begin to act the part.

The turnstiles creaked with the force of three and four people crammed between the swiveling bars. People began pushing more and raising elbows as they carved their way through the person in front. A man next to me held his toddler close to his chest, his protective arms wrapped tightly around the wide-eyed child. The man turned slightly to his left, toward me, and threw up on the cardboard littered on the asphalt. As I waded my way to the door, a small old woman tried to slip in front of me. But by then the swelling crowd was hammering into my back and she became pinned between my body and the wall. I thrust out my arms and pushed against the wall to keep from crushing her; she quickly hopped through the door in the briefly acquired space.

I finally got to the document inspection stations after almost an hour-and-a-half. Tacked between two windows was a poster that only Palestinians and internationals see, because entering the West Bank is illegal for Israeli citizens. The poster showed a family in front of the Roman aqueduct on the beach at Caesarea Maritima. They were all smiling, staring wistfully out to the Mediterranean that reflected their gaze in broken strips of glass-like tide. The daughter held a beach ball and an American football sat in the sand next to the dad’s feet. Israelis don’t play American football. Above the faces and the American football that only Palestinians and internationals see were the words: “Israel- Where it’s vacation time all year round.”

Metaphors for God

2009-11-16T05:14:00.001-06:00

Aldous Huxley said, “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Music can communicate the most unspeakable emotions, but instead of using words, it speaks with rhythm, melody, and harmony. Or rather: music does not speak; it moves.

Not all music is exactly the same. Music sounds differently in every culture, felt and expressed in remarkably diverse ways, all emanating the character and passion of that culture. But even though the style of sounds may be different, it is still music. A Sikh friend once told me that music is one of the five mysteries that break into the borders of this world from the divine outside. Music is somehow transcendent, somehow wholly other, while also being immanent, a transforming presence, whether in gentle ripples or in undulating waves. Music can be haunting, a lingering in the heart, soul, and mind that remains present even in its absence. Music domesticates the chaos of noise to create rhythm and harmony. But music can also be jarring and dissonant, allowing room for some of the chaos to remain. Discordant notes can communicate the unspeakable emotions just as well as the harmonious.

I can’t quite put my finger on the way music moves me, but I know when it does. Music cannot be grasped, but in some way it does the holding.

In many of the world’s religions (including the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions) ritual baths of pure water cleanse the body of impurity, giving new life. Water revives and water refreshes. We cannot live without water because water is living. Usually, where water is, there life will be growing also. Food can be ignored for days, but water is essential to our survival, especially as we wander in the desert places.

Water flows in many forms. Rivers move and change the land around them, following a way even as they make new paths. Rain leaves the heavens to wash and cultivate the earth. Oceans are vast and broad and deep. Water is within us, but also something that we can move within, ungraspable as it slips through our fingers.

But the water sometimes dries up, and all we are left with are stagnant pools and small ponds, sometimes with nothing at all and we can die from our devastating thirst. Sometimes the water we are offered is undrinkable. Like an ancient mariner, we may often find that though we are on a sea, there is not a “drop to drink.” But we set out swimming toward that distant unreachable shore, even though our arms and legs soon tire and leave us “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” Sometimes we have to struggle in that space between swimming and drowning. Sometimes the only thing to do is float.

In Greek, Hebrew, and, to a certain extent, Latin, spirit and wind and breath (nouma, ruach, spiritus) are the same. When people said one, they said all three.

All things breathe and must breathe, because breath is the source of life and the ground of being. In the beginning, God formed a shape from the created dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul,” (which is a thoroughly non-dualistic understanding of humanity). The soul is what arises when the spirit/wind/breath of God inhales and exhales in and through the dirt. Creation lives because of breath . . . spirit, wind that hovered over the waters.

The one who is like spirit and wind and breath is “over all, in all, and through all,” and the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.” Like music, we cannot hold spirit, wind, and breath, but we are held by it as it moves within us and around us, literally in-spiring us. Our spirit begins with the breath of God that embraces us like the wind.

Sometimes for most of us, most of the time for some of us, it feels like Someone is holding their breath and we suffocate in its absence. The barren and desolate places that we enter, or that we make, are where the wind stops blowing and the spirit feels dead and we gasp at the shortness of breath. But breath is present, even if it is only our own, whispering like a small wind, a barely perceptible spirit.
Maybe the only way to touch spirit/wind/breath is by touching those stirred by it and filled with it. To touch the world.

Petra: An Epilogue on Globalshift.com

2009-11-06T02:31:00.002-06:00

The last story in a series of seven about my trip here in March has been published on www.globalshift.org. So, feel free to check it out!

God, Whatever That Means: Part Two

2009-10-29T02:28:00.002-05:00

“God cannot be expressed but only experienced,” because in the end our language about God must be silence. Even the word “God” cannot begin to contain what it strains to reveal, especially because of the connotations that drag so heavily behind the term. And yet, despite this acknowledgement that God is beyond comprehension, the tongues of the ancient mystics dripped with honey as they spoke of the impossibility to speak of God. They relentlessly explored language to find more ways to search for God, because only one metaphor was not enough. They saw God as Fire, Light and Darkness, Silence, Event, and Mother.

In many ways I can rightly be called an ‘atheist,’ but I immediately hesitate writing that word because its assumed reference is too narrow for me, as is the classical definition of ‘theist.’ Maybe a/theist works better, or "orthodox heretic," if labels are indeed preferable. I am nervous to be this honest. I find deep meaning in many traditions of the Christian religion, in people like Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa (among a vast host of others), and even though in many ways I feel like I have left Christianity behind, I know that I can never truly abandon it because it has informed me and shaped my language. Once again, I find Wendell Berry speaking to me: “[T]here are an enormous number of people- and I am one of them- whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it.”

But as I learn more of other religions, I have eyes to see that whatever simmers beneath Christianity also simmers beneath Islam, Native American spirituality, and the teachings of the Buddha. I find myself covenanted to the im/possible event and wrestling to live out the questions through the way of Jesus. I wrestle with what one of my closest friends has tattooed on his arm: meaninglessness and covenant. I don’t know what to say about God. T.S. Eliot said, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” Maybe that is the best place to start because commitment in humble uncertainty, which is faith, is fertile soil for dialogue.

If everything was certain and mystery was nonexistent, then nothing would need to be asked for, sought for, knocked for because the answers have already been given. Jesus revealed the kingdom of God through stories and questions as mystery, a secret still hidden in its disclosure, like a treasure buried in a field or a pearl of great price whose wealth can only be experienced by giving it up. Jesus could only hint at the kingdom’s presence, and he did this by healing the sick and eating with outcasts, not by establishing religious dogma. I am certainly not suggesting in any of this that religion is utterly worthless, because art, liturgy, lament, poetry, mystery, and the sacred can and should be expressed and practiced in dialogic rituals with a shared community. But I agree with John Caputo when he says “Some people can be deeply and abidingly ‘religious’ with or without theology, with or without the religions. Religion may be found with or without religion.” For him, those who love God are people who are worth their salt, and religions are only good if they are true: “Salt is my criterion of truth, and love is my criterion of salt.” I say “Yes, and yes.”

For me, God is not an almighty, sovereign, separate force that controls or pulls or coerces; I think God is more a weak call, like an inviting whisper that haunts you and must either be answered or ignored. The power of God is in powerlessness, weakness, and foolishness (1 Corinthians), like a beaten man hanging naked on the cross of an empire. True sacrifice and redemption can only happen without the force of power and the certainty of reward. God is more in absence and presence, in the sound of silence, in the faces and cacophonous voices of the suffering who cry out for liberation and deliverance, in little moments, in diversity. God is only experienced in and as action. God is love, justice, compassion, forgiveness, the other. There is an “endless translatability” between God and these things until I am not sure which is a version of which: is love a way of exemplifying God, or is God a way of exemplifying love? The Fox Indians say “When you have learned about love, you have learned about God.” Everything, the Law and the Prophets, everything is summed up in this: “Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself,” and these two are inseparably one. God is like the Tao, the source of life and the way of life, and the Tao that can be explained is not the true Tao. I see all of this most fully and deeply in the life and death and way of life of Jesus of Nazareth. This way requires new eyes, and requires that we be reborn into a new way of engaging with the world that opens up a path to the deep heart of reality, which is God.

In some upcoming posts, I want to share several metaphors for God that are deeply meaningful and engaging to me. All cultures and religions use metaphors to carry the deep wonder of their experiences of the divine over the void, into meaning. Metaphors are bearers of meaning; they are sacraments because they can convey the divine to us, and they convey it among us. For many of us, the divine has only been conveyed through Western, masculine metaphors; we choke God with these confining sweaters that we weave, refusing to allow any room for God to move or breathe. In our oversaturation, we have lost the nourishing insight that “[t]he unnameable is omninameable” . . .

Dust and Dirt

2009-10-26T01:37:00.008-05:00

The greenhouse at the Al-Basma Center was barren. The crumbling rows were empty and lifeless. Patrick, Paul, and I took our pickaxes and hoes inside and began to churn the clotted earth. Basma, the acting director who has been with the Center since its beginning, sent us out in hesitant English to “break up the ground so the farmer can bring the planets”; Patrick later drew a picture explaining the difference. Soon, the cucumber plants would be placed in the ground. Soon, the water in the drip-irrigation pipes that rested on the rows would seep into the ground and the plants would grow. Soon, we would be wrapping strings, tied between the ceiling’s spines and the pipes, around the growing plants. And soon, we would be picking the cucumbers from the whiskery leaves and eating them with pita, tomatoes, and rice. But now, rocks needed to be sifted from the soil and weeds needed to be pulled and composted. This small patch of earth needed to be healed before it could give.

Aside from Musalaha, I spend some time each week working with the Al-Basma Center (to see my short story about the Center for the Palestine Monitor, go to http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article488). Patrick has worked fulltime with the Center because the organization he spoke to before coming never confirmed a possible job for him. Something about the Center spoke to him that first day he visited, so he never left. My family has been close friends with the Center’s founder and director, Abdullah Awwad, for several years. The three of us planned on living with Abdullah and his wife, but just before we came he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Because of his call for justice and the end of the Israeli Occupation, Abu Shahdi has been barred from entering Jerusalem. However, he somehow gained permission to go for treatment and before we arrived he left for surgery in Germany. Palestine hasn’t been the same for me without him here.

Like Jemima, the Al-Basma Center, which is in a building connected to the Arab Women’s Union, takes care of developmentally disabled youth. Through activities like olivewood carving, recycled card-making, weaving, and creating fuel from sawdust, the youth are taught practical skills and the belief that they are capable of contributing to society. Six incredibly devoted and sacrificial women are paid next to nothing so the Center can continue. Each month is a struggle to survive. And yet, even with the Center’s severe financial problems, the place is filled with laughter and the obvious love the workers have for the students. On occasion they give us their needed leftover food to take back to our flat on the hill. Noor cooks and dumps the food into plastic containers and orders us to take it; we say “Shukran, Noor,” and she replies “Aufwan, habibi.” She cackled through her crooked teeth when she first saw me, exclaiming, through translation, that I looked like Mohanned, the star of an insanely popular Turkish soap opera called Noor, which made her cackle all the more. Last summer, every conservative Muslim woman whispered Mohanned’s name as I walked past. I’ve never received more lauding attention than when I’m in Palestine and people beg to take their pictures with “Mohanned.”

Whenever the students arrive at the Center, Patrick and I come out of the little office to greet them. Nisal excitedly crouches down and shouts “Habibi!” and spreads his arms out to hug me. He began calling me “Mohanned” and somehow that became “Abu-hanned.” Sometimes, he seems to forget our names, or plays a guessing game, because every now and then he calls Patrick “John.” Nisal frequently comes through the small patio to the open pink door of the office, sometimes dancing as he comes, watching as Patrick prints words on the recycled cards after I’ve cut them to size. Nisal repeats our names (“Abu-hanned? Ah, John? Batrick?”) over and over until we finally look up at him. Then he raises his hand dramatically and begins belting operatic undulations and then whispering falsetto melodies. Khalil is one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen. His face displays the characteristics of Down’s syndrome; I have never seen him stop smiling. His short, stubby body shuffles toward me and his innocent, illuminated eyes stare up at me as he takes my hand, saying nothing, smiling. I’ve watched Khalil regularly push another student in a wheelchair up the ramp to the Center’s entrance; Khalil bends down to talk with his friend but the wheelchair starts swerving and they almost run into the railing. He blows kisses at Patrick through the window of the bus as he leaves in the afternoon.

Abdullah is tall with cropped hair and he waddles around on his tiptoes with his shirt tucked in. His brow and eyes always look worried as he hurries from group to group, like he’s afraid he’s been excluded somewhere. About a hundred times a day he races toward Patrick until their noses almost touch, pointing his forefinger in Patrick’s face and crying with exploding intensity “Batrick! Inte sahibi! You are my friend! Innnnte, inte sahibi!” Sana is spry and thin, a perpetual mischievous and salivating smile beneath his scruffy unibrow. He knows everyone in Beit Sahour and he enters every room saying his name as a greeting. He sits quietly outside of the kitchen whenever we eat breakfast, his ferret-like features intensely watching the diminishing pita and eggs. Then he swoops in and snatches a piece of bread from the table, scurrying out with crumbs falling from his mouth.

The three of us bent down to our knees and began ripping out weeds along the far translucent wall of the greenhouse. Somehow this particular area became extremely infested. The strong roots of the weeds were deep and connected like a web, twisted around larges clumps of dirt. My hands were soon blistered and bleeding as I ripped the weeds from the rocky soil. My hands felt good. Sitting in front of a computer in an industrial zone in Jerusalem depressed me and I needed to get my hands back in the dirt. There is goodness in dust and dirt. And in people who come from dust and dirt and breath, which is everyone. I am happier under an open sky with no concrete under my feet. I am happier when I feel connected with people and with the earth, with the sacred. I want relationship with life.

The land is a gift, and it gives gifts because it gives life. Wendell Berry, a poet and a farmer (which go together so naturally), said “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.” Much of creation is stolen in Palestine through a spreading colonialism until eventually only patches like the greenhouse will be left for the people who live here. And water is being stolen as well. Water and land mean life. I recently heard about a family in Beit Sahour who, like many families, has not had water for five days, and their reserve tank is running low, because the irrigation systems favor the web of illegal settlements that twist around the clumped hilltops. The family once relied on an old well on their land when the water was shut off, but they returned home one day to find the Israeli army digging up the pipes and rerouting them toward the settlements for the swimming pools and gardens. This is a desecration to dust and dirt, and breath.

Wendell Berry also wrote this in a poem: “There are no unsacred places:/There are only sacred places/and desecrated places.” This is a sacred place and a desecrated place and somehow the two are more visible because they reside in and as the same land. The sacred burns beneath the desecrated and, like sparks, every now and then flickers through.

Globalshift.org

2009-10-20T03:53:00.003-05:00

My sixth story in a series of seven about my trip to Israel/Palestine in March has recently been published on www.globalshift.org. The titles are: Return; The Holocaust and the Nakba (which is frustratingly not the edited version that I sent them; either way, this short story is thoroughly inadequate for the enormity of the subject matter); Water is Welcome; The High-Tech Oasis of the Desert; Birdcages; and Embracing the Incomprehensible. The final one, Petra: An Epilogue, should be published in the near future . . .

God, Whatever That Means

2009-10-19T01:05:00.001-05:00

“We must appreciate that we are lost before being ‘found’ or being ‘saved’ makes any sense,” because we have to lose in order to find, to be emptied in order to be filled.

Martin Buber once said “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable.” The world is large, and contains multitudes, and no system will completely resolve all the contradictions, both beautiful and terrible. But the world’s multitudes can be embraced. Perhaps, in this way, “God,” whatever that means, is like “the world.”

A great divorce always exists between God and our words about God, because we are never really speaking about God, but only about our understanding of God. But for some unexplainable reason, we cannot stop ourselves from stretching our language to the breaking point in order to make some sense of that which we cannot make sense. John Caputo, one of my favorite authors, exclaims, and I with him, “Why can I not stop speaking of God, of whom I cannot say a thing? . . . To set out for a shore that we can never reach, to be exposed to a secret we can never plumb- what is that if not a description of a proper path to God?”

I cannot offer any answers, because I don’t want to dogmatically construct yet another kind of individualism. Instead, I want to form community with others as I ask and seek and knock. As a poet once said, "[T]he point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Perhaps we can see our language, our “raid on the inarticulate,” as an embrace of God rather than an attempt to define God.

My attempt is to find some way through these stories and reflections to speak meaningfully of God, which is not the same as speaking authoritatively, as if humans could ever do such a thing. I only have a hunger that is rarely filled, because I hunger for something meaningful. And I hunger for “what has been lost/And found and lost again and again.” I hunger for God, whatever in the world that means, and so I walk willingly out to wander through the forgotten deserts. And in my, and our, going may we remember, as Tolkien reminds us, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

The Almond Tree

2009-10-14T09:21:00.003-05:00

Ra’ed Hanania sped through the serpentine roads of Beit Jala, haphazardly shifting the gears without completely pushing down the clutch. He honked as we rounded every turn so that anyone on the other side knew we were coming, or maybe because everyone honks here, and everyone honks here constantly: people drive with one with hand on the steering wheel and the other hand on the horn. Stoplights haven’t changed from red to green before someone pounds the horn fifteen cars back.

Patrick and I met Ra’ed earlier that morning at the Talitha Qumi School in Beit Jala, where Musalaha held a monthly curriculum teaching seminar. Ra’ed’s name was on my list of forty people to interview. We stood together in line for lunch and talked about a possible meeting time. Ra’ed was incredibly friendly, and he spoke quickly and laughed spiritedly. He had very short, curly, gelled hair and his hand occasionally reached up to scratch his scruffy chin. Between mouthfuls of pita and hoummus, we talked about Musalaha, and I confessed to him that I had some questions about the organization and if, in all the needed talk about reconciliation, justice was ignored. He thought for a minute and looked around, his head lowering between his shoulders as we hovered over the table.

“Musalaha does many great things and I think it is so good to try and bring people from both sides together through, you know, a shared faith. But, sometimes, I think they try to say that we are equal, and we are not. In the eyes of God, yes, we are equal, but in the eyes of the people, the Israeli government, we are not equal. One side is occupying and oppressing the other and this we cannot forget.”

Ra’ed then told us about his job as management deputy for Jemima, a home in Beit Jala for physically and mentally disabled children. He was excited when he learned that Patrick and I were working with the Al-Basma Center and he immediately invited us to come and see Jemima. We soon jumped into his little car with worn-out gears and drove to the complex which cuts into the side of a steep hill. As we pulled in on a small driveway between a playground and rock face, Ra’ed said that Jemima was the name of one of Job’s daughters. I didn’t remember Job’s daughters having names. Maybe the children who live at Jemima are like the daughters of Job, forgotten in the midst of some sick cosmic test.

A Dutch couple founded Jemima in 1982 and the place now contains a small school and a living facility for the children. Jemima provides physical and speech therapy and care-workers are on 24-hour shifts so that someone is always present. Last year, I wrote a story for the Palestine Monitor about the Al-Basma Center, and this applies to the children involved with Jemima: “A large number of mental disabilities among youth in the area are the result of the close marriages prevalent within Palestinian culture . . . [S]tigmas resulting from a lack of awareness are associated with disabilities.” A family abandoning their child because of disabilities is not unheard of. Some are left on the doorstep or in hospitals. Jemima and the Al-Basma Center welcome the marginalized of the marginalized.

Ra’ed began working with Jemima while he was a student at Bethlehem Bible College. He wanted to do something helpful even if he wouldn’t be paid, something good because he said “Not doing something bad is not the same as doing something for God.” Jemima needed volunteers and so the BBC put him to work there.

“I was always scared of handicapped people,” he said with a shamed smile. “I would go to the other side of the street because I was afraid to walk past them.”
We entered the several-storey living facility and got the elevator to the third floor.

“My first job was a care-worker, so I was changing diapers, giving showers, and this, this changed me . . . it changed me a lot. I was touching them.”

Francis of Assisi was the rich son of a prominent cloth merchant. He was deathly afraid of lepers and would walk in another direction in order to avoid meeting one. But Francis slowly began to reject the wealth and comfort of his life. In order to master his overwhelming fear of lepers, he decided to give to any poor person who asked for alms. One day soon after this, Francis met a leper on the road. He passed the outcast as quickly as possible, still gripped with terror. But then he stopped, turned around, and grabbed the outstretched hand of the disfigured beggar and kissed it and filled it with money. Francis gave away all of his money and returned all of his clothes to his affluent father, marching naked out of the city center to spend the rest of his life in simplicity and devotion to the lepers near Assisi. Ra’ed’s conversion reminded me of one of my greatest heroes.

As we entered one of the living facilities the children greeted Ra’ed with enthusiastic shouts. He hugged them and kissed them on their heads. A little boy with knobby knees repeatedly exclaimed “Aghhh!” as he threw his toys into a big metal bowl. He looked at the collection for a few seconds before throwing them all back on the floor and picking them up again. Another boy named Anwar stumbled toward us and gave us fives. He wore a Finding Nemo t-shirt and had a Winnie-the-Pooh sticker on his forehead. He grabbed my arm and dragged me down the hall toward his small room saying “Yallah! Yallah! Let’s go! Hurry!” Ra’ed and Patrick laughed and ran after us. Anwar began jumping up and down, clapping his hands as he proudly pointed out his bed and a few toys scattered on a shelf. Then he snuck out of the room with a huge grin and tried to leave us inside. Patrick and I cried for help and pounded on the door with feigned despair before Anwar burst through and doubled over with laughter.

One of the little boys was three-years-old and still unable to talk. His head was almost as big as the rest of his body and very misshapen, like it had been squeezed in a vice. He couldn’t focus his eyes to look at us and they kept rolling around. But he smiled. Another boy sat in a wheelchair. His legs were severely underdeveloped and his head was like an over-inflated balloon. His face couldn’t fill up all the open space and so he tried to smile even wider. I looked around the room and I felt like I was watching God, whatever that means. I was watching the absence and presence of God in the same moment in the pure faces and broken bodies of those children who smiled. G-o-d-i-s-n-o-w-h-e-r-e lives in Jemima. A holy damned mess of the world’s suffering beauty.

One story about Francis of Assisi says that he looked with frantic intentness at an old almond tree in the dead of winter and cried “Speak to me of God!” And the tree immediately began to bloom.

Microcosm

2009-09-29T06:58:00.001-05:00

The Alternative Information Center, as its website describes, is an “internationally oriented, progressive, joint Palestinian-Israeli activist organization. It is engaged in the dissemination of information, political advocacy, grassroots activism and critical analysis of the Palestinian and Israeli societies and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” and operates with the “awareness that local struggle must be practically and analytically situated within the framework of the global justice struggle.”

I visited the AIC in Beit Sahour several times when I lived in Ramallah during the summer of 2008. On Tuesday and Saturday nights the AIC hosts speakers or films that present a rarely-heard perspective in the conflict’s raging cacophony. Patrick, Paul, and I walked down the tall hill from our flat to a quiet alley off Suq Al-sha’ab, the center of Beit Sahour. The dim rooms sat slightly underground and burrowed back into parlors beneath low ceilings. A man walked down the stairs to the bar in the corner alcove. He welcomed us warmly, introducing himself as Steve from Wales, “which is the smallest and poorest country in Britain, rather like the Arkansas of the UK.” He invited us into an adjoining room with a small window opening to the entrance hallway. “Boycott Israel” and “Olive Tree Campaign: Keep Hope Alive” posters on the stone walls filled in the spaces not taken by wooden bookshelves. I scanned the diverse titles, ranging from books about the conflict to geography, from Edward Said to Norman Maclean’s rhythmic A River Runs Through It. Patrick, Paul, and I sat down at a large table in middle of the room.

Steve sat in a small corner with his long bony legs crossed. He had shaggy curly hair that was pulled away from his hawkish face and wispy goatee. He had dark crescent moons beneath the rims of his eyes. As we talked he rolled dozens of cigarettes, pausing his speech to lick and seal the paper and take a sip of Taybeh beer. Every now and then he gazed into the red ashes of his cigarette like he was looking for something he could never find because it kept disappearing in the flame. He came to Palestine six years ago, barely twenty years old, and married a Palestinian Christian girl from Beit Jala.

“My wife is very different from most Beit Jala Christians,” he explained in a thick Welsh accent. “Most Beit Jala Christians are very sectarian and condemning of their Muslim neighbors, which is a bit strange because they find themselves as a two percent minority in the Bethlehem area.” He paused his speech to blow into the end of his cigarette until it glowed, wiping away the gray ash that fell on his knees. “If you ever find yourself as two percent of any population the first rule is to keep your head down. You don’t stand up on a pedestal and say ‘You are alllll bastards!’”

Steve and his wife started a permaculture farm called Bustan Qaraaqa, the Tortoise Garden. They wanted to instigate a green movement in Palestine that would engage problems like food insecurity and environmental deprivation. The Palestinian Territories don’t have the resources for ecological welfare, which means recycling is nonexistent. Trash is dumped into large metal containers by roadsides and burned. Bustan Qaraaqa experiments with simple and inexpensive projects for sustainable living. He told us he was now preparing to move back home in order to create an eco-village in the rural farmland of Wales. He hopes to form connections with the farm he started here and with other similar places around the world to encourage and promote equitable and holistic farming.

“I’m a bit nervous about going back to my consumerist homeland,” he said, taking a larger sip from his glass of Taybeh beer. “This is where shopping centers are in buildings like B-52 hangars in complexes as big as the West Bank, where the good citizens go and push their carts with their heads cocked to one side, their eyes glazed over as the sweet music places like some Orwellian nightmare.”

He shivered and some of the ashes from his fifteenth cigarette fell to the stone floor and he took another sip of beer.

We told him some of our stories and he marveled that three graduates of a conservative Christian university in Arkansas were sitting with him in Palestine. Sometimes, I said, closed environments can be the most fertile places for radical transformation because once you start questioning one thing then everything is open to being reinterpreted. In such places you start to question because often the opposite is encouraged. And the conversion becomes more real because the initial desire for conversion has come from deep inside.

“You’ve made a point there, you have,” said Steve nodding. “Here you’ve got all these liberal hippie kids who grow up in the most open environments and they spit out platitudes about justice, but then they do nothing about it and are actually just as close-minded and hateful as the people they criticize. There’s nothing pushing them to be genuine.”

Our conversation diverged on a hundred little paths and we talked about the plight of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, the fact that the world’s headquarters for child sex-trafficking is Tel Aviv, and the complete history of the Texas comedian Bill Hicks. Before I left on this trip for the Middle East my family and I spent two weeks driving around the North American Midwest. Steve readily agreed when I pointed out that the way American Indians were forcefully moved and partitioned is eerily similar to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, almost like there’s a thinktank across the ocean and shady politicians in nice suits meet in Washington coffee ships and say “Oh that worked splendidly over here, you should give it a go where you are!”

The voices in the next room were getting louder as more people gathered around the small bar. Whatever activity that was scheduled for the night was about to start. Steve drained his glass and lit another cigarette.

“You know, you can find a worse example of anything happening here in Palestine somewhere else. Anything. Water crisis: somewhere else there is a far more severe shortage. Other places have more volatile social and religious conflicts. More land has been stolen in other parts of the world. And there are even worse military occupations than Israel’s.”

He leaned forward. “But the interesting thing about Palestine is that everything, all of those things, can be found right here, like it’s a microcosm of the entire world’s disasters.”

The air above Steve’s head was hazy as another puff of smoke assembled in the growing cloud. Paul held his chin and stared quietly at the table’s cracked surface. Patrick slowly nodded as he processed the conversation. Steve methodically rolled another cigarette and the dark crescent moons under his eyes began to grow as the room darkened and the shadows connected across his gaunt features.

“It’s a funny place here,” he said softly.
“To say the least.”

I Try to Follow

2009-09-16T07:46:00.008-05:00

Patrick unhooked a ukulele from the straps of his backpack and Paul pulled a long travel guitar out of its black case. Their discordant plucking soon tuned into harmonic sounds and I tried to keep the beat by drumming on our wooden bench in Victoria Tower Gardens. Paul leaned forward as his fingers strummed faster. He usually looked more like a leprechaun with wavy red hair and a big red beard but he was neatly trimmed for our new journey. Paul is a natural musician and a clever engineer, which means he can make an instrument out of almost anything but the guitar would do for the moment. Patrick bent over his ukulele, his face distorted into grimaces and his body squirming. He always looks like he’s in pain when he’s making music, almost like music is too much a part of him to let go of too easily. “People walk a tightrope on a razor’s edge,” he cried with his eyes squinted and his legs kicking up, “Carry their hurt and hatred and weapons/It could be a bomb or a bullet or a pen/Or a thought or a word or a sentence.”

As our music got louder and our voices sang more freely, curious passersby briefly slowed down in order to catch a few chords in the breezy air. One smiling tourist snapped a few pictures of the three rugged bums on the park bench by the River Thames. Our voices mingled beneath the sound of footsteps on crunching leaves: “The wind blows wild and I may move/The politicians lie and I am not fooled/You don’t need no reason or a three-piece suit to argue the truth.”

Earlier the three of us walked out of a dark subway tunnel into the sunlight at Piccadilly Circus. Our journey from Houston to Tel Aviv was broken by a fifteen-hour layover in London and we decided to take advantage of it by spending the day in the city. We followed a map on a few pages cut from an old Lonely Planet guidebook, leading us past red telephone booths and statues of Lord Nelson. Parliament soon stood before us like a towering cathedral with hundreds of windows like eyes. Big Ben slowly wiped his face in time with each passing minute.

A row of dust-covered tents on the other side of the street paralleled the immense government house. A large sign was propped up next to the end of the tents: “On Strike for Peace: 24hr peace picket, parliament square,” and other protest signs lamented the disasters in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Gaza. Stained and tattered flags struggled to rise even when the wind encouraged them.

A man stood in front of the tents. He leaned on a pair of metal crutches and his suntanned leathery hands were joined in front of him as he stared at the sidewalk. The three of us walked across the street toward him with Parliament in front of him and Westminster Abbey behind him. He greeted us with a thin smile framed by a greasy peppered beard. His bloodshot eyes were darkened beneath a deteriorating miner’s hat that disappeared beneath protest buttons. He spoke quietly, almost inaudibly, as if he was afraid Parliament would overhear. As he told us about the corruption of the British government and the complicity of churches in organized murder, he glanced over our shoulders at the bobbies patrolling the gates of the government seat. He seemed worn down by the authorities’ disregard of his protest. He stared at the parapets and spires but the hundreds of windows like eyes ignored him. No one was listening to his conversations and he spit out the word “Parliament” like it was bitter and burning his mouth. The lonely protester soon forgot we were there and began staring again, waiting for any hint of recognition. I noticed a small sign as we began to walk away: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do; Children forgive us for now we do.”

The trees in the park reached over the stone wall and dipped their fingers into the water. Shadows and sunlight conversed above fallen leaves on the pavement. We wiped the crumbs of our trail mix onto the ground and Patrick and Paul began strumming again: “The air on my skin and the world under my toes/Slavery stitched into the fabric of my clothes/Chaos and commotion wherever I go, love I try to follow/Love will come set me free.” Paul put his guitar back in its black case and Patrick strapped the ukulele to his backpack. We sat silently and looked at the boats speeding under bridges on the river. We listened, but all we heard was the whispering call of love and justice, which “is what love looks like in public,” and it was calling us to chaos and commotion. So we stood up and followed.

Stories of Paradox

2009-09-08T06:08:00.005-05:00

The door to our flat on the hill is open and the space serves as a funnel for occasional breaths of wind. A few branches from the tree on the concrete patio dip beneath the mantle and are nodding with the call to prayer that rises from the village of Beit Sahour, the House of Vigilance. The slow, undulating chant hits me like a surging wave against a shoreline and I can’t tell whether the call is adding to me or eroding me, or both happening together. I feel like maybe I should stand up in respect or lie down in assent, so instead I just sit and listen to the deep-voiced reverence and feel the breeze of Palestine that cools the room.

For the next six months I will be working with an organization called Musalaha (“reconciliation” in Arabic), which is committed to uniting Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims and Christians, as they dismantle barriers and deconstruct worldviews. I was given a list of forty Israelis and Palestinians to interview and then incarnate my skeletal notes as stories about encounters with the other and events of reconciliation. And I will help the Al Basma Center, a facility for developmentally disabled youth in Beit Sahour. Working in orphanages in India and Nepal during March and April waits in a possible future.

Patrick Covert and Paul Elliott, two of the closest friends I have ever had, are with me and I am so excited, because living alone in the midst of oppression and violence and hatred and poverty is not easy. I was nervous, almost hesitant, about putting my feet down again in this place for the fifth time (for seven stories about my most recent trip in March, please visit www.globalshift.org). But my nervousness made me want to come even more and I felt hesitant and anxious at the same time: hesitant to go and anxious to get there. I realized that I wasn’t coming to Israel and Palestine for comfort or safety or an easy chance to travel. I wanted to come because I want to do good work, with my words and with my hands. Here I am almost forced to live more deeply and more fully because I am completely emptied as I wonder and wander. Tolkien said “Not all those who wander are lost,” and few words contain so much meaning for me, both spiritually and geographically. This blog is a place where I hope to share some of my wonderings and wanderings.

The first blog I kept, called “The Wanderer,” was during a semester abroad in China, Australia, New Zealand, and a few South Pacific islands. I started the second one last summer while working as a journalist for the Palestine Monitor in Ramallah; I didn’t stress myself too much looking for a new name, because the title of the second one was “The Wanderer: Part Two.” So for the third round I wanted something a little different, but a name that still found itself within the recurring theme. I wrote an article for a website about a worldview of travel rooted in wondering and wandering. The word wonder can mean “to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe,” but it can also mean “to doubt” or “to question.” To wander is “to travel about, on, or through,” and not only geographically. The W(a/o)nderer is my attempt to see the two as inseparably one.

Frederick Buechner wrote that “In Hebrew the term dabar means both ‘word’ and ‘deed.’ Thus to say something is to do something . . . Words are power, essentially the power of creation. By my words I both discover and create who I am. By my words I elicit a word from you. Through our converse we create each other.” Words and actions create stories and stories create meaning.

We are saved by stories. Truth is discovered, created, given room to happen in stories. But stories are only true if they inhabit the “paradoxical between,” wrestling in the tense coexistence between hope and despair, order and chaos, joy and sorrow, absence and presence. In stories we live out the questions. We become part of a transforming, resurrecting story that doesn’t necessarily seek to answer the questions, but instead presents a Way in which to live them. I am beginning to have eyes to see that truth, whatever that is, is a paradox, because if I want to be found I have to be lost, if I want to be filled I have to be emptied, and if I want to live I have to first die.

The stories I want to share are about life in the paradoxical struggle and tension. I hope they will be true. And maybe these stories can create an open space for the sacred event of what seems like the impossible to happen, because stories not only describe reality, they transform it. Stories say something and do something.