Windows on an Endangered World
A report from the Sabeel Conference which took place a little earlier this month. It was attended by parishioners from the Clifton Diocese.
When I was a child, I had a toy kaleidoscope which was made of three mirrors, aligned to reflect the jumbled coloured pieces and form an intricate pattern, so long as the light shone through the window at the end of the narrow tube. Joggle it, and the pieces form a different pattern. The kaleidoscope comes to mind as I try to convey something of the richness of our encounters and experiences during our week with the Sabeel conference at the beginning of November.
The preliminary invitation was exciting enough, with the promise of three different centres, Jerusalem, Jericho and Nazareth from which we were to go out and visit communities in the different areas. The draft programme was a dazzling construction, even though many projected speakers were tagged with “Subject to Confirmation.” The subject was The Forgotten Faithful: a Window into the Life and Witness of Christians in the Holy Land. Hence the many-faceted splendours of the presentation.
The Middle East is often reckoned to be a male-dominated culture, so it’s worth stating at the start that Palestinian women had a full and invaluable part in the whole week. The Sabeel Board and staff members, the speakers and moderators of the formal sessions, the Palestinian and international participants were an integrated community; young teens of both sexes danced together as members of the Al-Funoun group, the Mayor of Ramallah who addressed us is a woman and we were delighted to see a girl altar server at Mass in Jericho on the Sunday – typically looking alert and reflective with hands folded together while her boy associate server stood on the sanctuary with arms folded, (like Napoleon!) looking disengaged.
We’re mostly familiar with the individual aspects of the mainstream churches in our own country, but in Palestine the Eastern and Western Churches meet and live side by side in the land where Jesus was conceived, born, lived, and died, and left his Church to continue his life. Even here, perhaps especially here, the Churches have been disunited over the centuries, but some at least are drawing closer together. Certainly all know that there is more that unites us than draws us apart. We were able to question in open forum leading members of many churches indigenous to the Middle East. In many parts of Palestine the Christian churches follow the Latin Church’s dating of Christmas, and the Orthodox calendar for Easter. As Christians are a minority in Gaza, the West Bank and (Palestinian) Arab Israel, this is a sensible arrangement. To encounter these prelates from the Armenian, Coptic, Maronite and Orthodox Churches, along with the Latin Patriarch and other notables from Western Christendom gave us a wonderfully vivid sense of the catholicity of the Church of God.
The interchurch membership ran right through the conference; we had come together as Christians to meet with Christians in Palestine, and our particular allegiances were not obtrusive. Yes, the Catholics wanted to attend Sunday worship where we would be allowed to receive Holy Communion, (not normally allowed in a Greek Orthodox Church) and Catherine and I thought ourselves most fortunate to visit the church of the Good Shepherd in Jericho, and to meet their Franciscan priest Fr Firaz. This congregation was lively and happy, singing with full-throated fervour. The children wandered around during Mass, little ones snuggling up to any available adult while regarding the strangers with silent curiosity.
“Coffee in the Hall after Mass” sounded pretty familiar, but they had laid on a full-scale reception! Two different age-groups of child dancers performed for us the traditional Palestinian dabke, and the performance was completed by a breathtaking group of three young women, warmly applauded by the audience of visitors and grannies. We felt totally at home in the Good Shepherd Jericho, with its fine school next door, the buildings being extended to take in more pupils, both Christian and Muslim.
On the topic of Jericho, this was the hotel we liked best; the Jericho Resort Village, lies to the north of this richly lush city, with dramatic hills to the west, and beautiful flowering shrubs. The hotel was in very good order and the staff courteous and efficiently friendly. Incidentally, all the hotel staff we saw were male, probably a result of the desperate employment situation in Palestinian society. The figures we found for unemployment were nearly 25% (and that includes university graduates). The average net wage for the employed is US$16, and as we know, due to international withholding of Palestinian monies since the elections last January, many have no recent salaries paid, and are destitute. (Despite that, there were no beggars.).
Small wonder in these circumstances that we were repeatedly told that the number of Christians is diminishing as many who can manage to get away are emigrating. A young person leaving home to seek work is a situation familiar to Dursley, but in Palestine this is rather different. Once abroad many will not be able to return home, and will forfeit rights of citizenship if they do not return within three years. Nor will their parents be able to join them abroad, and indeed even travel within the Occupied Palestinian Territories is severely restricted by the Israeli forces, implementing the policy of road closures, checkpoints, harassment re travel regulations, the occupation of Palestinian agricultural land for Israeli settlements and the confiscation of aquifer areas for designated “militarised zones.” The inverted commas indicate my observation that the entire country is a zone totally controlled by Israeli military.
Take for instance the example of Nadia. Nadia lives in Ramallah, and is probably in her fifties. She applied to the Israeli authorities who issue the travel passes for their permission to attend the Sabeel Conference, which meant travelling to Jerusalem, spending a day in Bethlehem, moving on to Jericho and going out from there to various towns and villages near Ramallah. After that, north through Samaria and up to villages in the Galilee very near the border with Lebanon, spending two nights in Nazareth before our final service by the Sea of Galilee.
Nadia gave the Israelis the draft programme and was kept waiting for five days before they gave her a fully authorised pass to undertake the whole conference journey. The delay meant she arrived a day late, but all went well until we were leaving Aboud, a village in Samaria and heading for a village in the Galilee called Rameh. We’d had the impression up to this point that the checkpoint hold-ups for Internationals, though not Palestinians, were less rigorous than we had experienced in 2004 and 2005. This time however, the armed soldier came through our coach, inspecting passports/papers. He reached Nadia, and took her pass and her papers from her without a word, got off the coach and looked them over. He came aboard again: “Who’s the guy in charge of this bus? I need to speak to you outside.” Salim (I think it was) descended and spoke for 5 mins or so before coming back aboard. “This is the situation; the soldiers say there is someone on the bus whose papers do not permit passage through this checkpoint and they advise us to leave her behind. Of course I said we would do no such thing. I’ll talk to him a bit and see what can be arranged.”
So Salim continued talking, while poor Nadia said, ”Oh, I’m so sorry to be such a nuisance,” and everyone turned to her and said firmly, ”It’s not YOUR fault,” and “Goodness gracious!” and suchlike. The upshot was that the soldiers said Nadia couldn’t pass through this checkpoint, but could go through another one miles away. They returned her pass which was in fact legit for all checkpoints, and our coach returned for some 20 mins the way we’d come before taking a different route. The next checkpoint waved us through unexamined. We got through – then cheered! (What would you have done?) But we were very late for our reception and the splendid lunch prepared for us in Rameh, a hillside village with rich green olive groves and fabulous views.
In Bethlehem we were due for lectures in the Catholic University, with an excursion to the shrines in the lunch hour. This midday trip had to be cancelled as the previous day, after some weeks without violent action, the Israeli forces had entered the city, shot dead two young men, shot a grandmother, who was in hospital “brain-dead,” and injured a youth. Then they bull-dozed a couple of houses. As the funerals were being held the day we were there and the atmosphere in the city was very volatile, we remained on campus and prayed for the “martyrs” and the bereaved. That was an embargo that we accepted for our own good. Later in the week while we were in Nazareth, we heard of the 19 civilians killed by Israeli rocket (an “error”) in Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip, an event that briefly drew world condemnation.
This is the Holy Land, where Jesus lived and died, killed by the occupying power. Where Christians still live and die alongside their Moslem brothers and sisters. Jesus was here, in Palestine; he is still here and here he still waits to welcome us. Jesus Christ is a great part of Palestine present and of Palestine to come. He is here in the Christians who belong to him and in the Moslems who respect and revere him. Like Jesus their compatriot, the people of Palestine have a great charism of welcome, of acceptance, of giving. We find they give us far more than we can give them, and to visit them is a true conversion experience.
We won’t labour on about the stupid treatment we received at the airport as we were leaving Israel. Sufficient to say that when they suspected we’d been in Bethlehem, they took us apart in a two and a half hour security process of reiterated search, questioning and delay before escorting us to the departure lounge. (No way back). The Palestinians suffer so much more, all the days of their life.
These are just a few windows, patterns in my kaleidoscope of impressions. When Jesus was asked, “Where do you live?” he replied, “Come and see.” That is his invitation still. Just as he still invites us to drink his cup, to bear the Cross, to love our enemies. “And blessed are you when men persecute you and revile you . . .”
Mary Wood and Catherine Appleby
When I was a child, I had a toy kaleidoscope which was made of three mirrors, aligned to reflect the jumbled coloured pieces and form an intricate pattern, so long as the light shone through the window at the end of the narrow tube. Joggle it, and the pieces form a different pattern. The kaleidoscope comes to mind as I try to convey something of the richness of our encounters and experiences during our week with the Sabeel conference at the beginning of November.
The preliminary invitation was exciting enough, with the promise of three different centres, Jerusalem, Jericho and Nazareth from which we were to go out and visit communities in the different areas. The draft programme was a dazzling construction, even though many projected speakers were tagged with “Subject to Confirmation.” The subject was The Forgotten Faithful: a Window into the Life and Witness of Christians in the Holy Land. Hence the many-faceted splendours of the presentation.
The Middle East is often reckoned to be a male-dominated culture, so it’s worth stating at the start that Palestinian women had a full and invaluable part in the whole week. The Sabeel Board and staff members, the speakers and moderators of the formal sessions, the Palestinian and international participants were an integrated community; young teens of both sexes danced together as members of the Al-Funoun group, the Mayor of Ramallah who addressed us is a woman and we were delighted to see a girl altar server at Mass in Jericho on the Sunday – typically looking alert and reflective with hands folded together while her boy associate server stood on the sanctuary with arms folded, (like Napoleon!) looking disengaged.
We’re mostly familiar with the individual aspects of the mainstream churches in our own country, but in Palestine the Eastern and Western Churches meet and live side by side in the land where Jesus was conceived, born, lived, and died, and left his Church to continue his life. Even here, perhaps especially here, the Churches have been disunited over the centuries, but some at least are drawing closer together. Certainly all know that there is more that unites us than draws us apart. We were able to question in open forum leading members of many churches indigenous to the Middle East. In many parts of Palestine the Christian churches follow the Latin Church’s dating of Christmas, and the Orthodox calendar for Easter. As Christians are a minority in Gaza, the West Bank and (Palestinian) Arab Israel, this is a sensible arrangement. To encounter these prelates from the Armenian, Coptic, Maronite and Orthodox Churches, along with the Latin Patriarch and other notables from Western Christendom gave us a wonderfully vivid sense of the catholicity of the Church of God.
The interchurch membership ran right through the conference; we had come together as Christians to meet with Christians in Palestine, and our particular allegiances were not obtrusive. Yes, the Catholics wanted to attend Sunday worship where we would be allowed to receive Holy Communion, (not normally allowed in a Greek Orthodox Church) and Catherine and I thought ourselves most fortunate to visit the church of the Good Shepherd in Jericho, and to meet their Franciscan priest Fr Firaz. This congregation was lively and happy, singing with full-throated fervour. The children wandered around during Mass, little ones snuggling up to any available adult while regarding the strangers with silent curiosity.
“Coffee in the Hall after Mass” sounded pretty familiar, but they had laid on a full-scale reception! Two different age-groups of child dancers performed for us the traditional Palestinian dabke, and the performance was completed by a breathtaking group of three young women, warmly applauded by the audience of visitors and grannies. We felt totally at home in the Good Shepherd Jericho, with its fine school next door, the buildings being extended to take in more pupils, both Christian and Muslim.
On the topic of Jericho, this was the hotel we liked best; the Jericho Resort Village, lies to the north of this richly lush city, with dramatic hills to the west, and beautiful flowering shrubs. The hotel was in very good order and the staff courteous and efficiently friendly. Incidentally, all the hotel staff we saw were male, probably a result of the desperate employment situation in Palestinian society. The figures we found for unemployment were nearly 25% (and that includes university graduates). The average net wage for the employed is US$16, and as we know, due to international withholding of Palestinian monies since the elections last January, many have no recent salaries paid, and are destitute. (Despite that, there were no beggars.).
Small wonder in these circumstances that we were repeatedly told that the number of Christians is diminishing as many who can manage to get away are emigrating. A young person leaving home to seek work is a situation familiar to Dursley, but in Palestine this is rather different. Once abroad many will not be able to return home, and will forfeit rights of citizenship if they do not return within three years. Nor will their parents be able to join them abroad, and indeed even travel within the Occupied Palestinian Territories is severely restricted by the Israeli forces, implementing the policy of road closures, checkpoints, harassment re travel regulations, the occupation of Palestinian agricultural land for Israeli settlements and the confiscation of aquifer areas for designated “militarised zones.” The inverted commas indicate my observation that the entire country is a zone totally controlled by Israeli military.
Take for instance the example of Nadia. Nadia lives in Ramallah, and is probably in her fifties. She applied to the Israeli authorities who issue the travel passes for their permission to attend the Sabeel Conference, which meant travelling to Jerusalem, spending a day in Bethlehem, moving on to Jericho and going out from there to various towns and villages near Ramallah. After that, north through Samaria and up to villages in the Galilee very near the border with Lebanon, spending two nights in Nazareth before our final service by the Sea of Galilee.
Nadia gave the Israelis the draft programme and was kept waiting for five days before they gave her a fully authorised pass to undertake the whole conference journey. The delay meant she arrived a day late, but all went well until we were leaving Aboud, a village in Samaria and heading for a village in the Galilee called Rameh. We’d had the impression up to this point that the checkpoint hold-ups for Internationals, though not Palestinians, were less rigorous than we had experienced in 2004 and 2005. This time however, the armed soldier came through our coach, inspecting passports/papers. He reached Nadia, and took her pass and her papers from her without a word, got off the coach and looked them over. He came aboard again: “Who’s the guy in charge of this bus? I need to speak to you outside.” Salim (I think it was) descended and spoke for 5 mins or so before coming back aboard. “This is the situation; the soldiers say there is someone on the bus whose papers do not permit passage through this checkpoint and they advise us to leave her behind. Of course I said we would do no such thing. I’ll talk to him a bit and see what can be arranged.”
So Salim continued talking, while poor Nadia said, ”Oh, I’m so sorry to be such a nuisance,” and everyone turned to her and said firmly, ”It’s not YOUR fault,” and “Goodness gracious!” and suchlike. The upshot was that the soldiers said Nadia couldn’t pass through this checkpoint, but could go through another one miles away. They returned her pass which was in fact legit for all checkpoints, and our coach returned for some 20 mins the way we’d come before taking a different route. The next checkpoint waved us through unexamined. We got through – then cheered! (What would you have done?) But we were very late for our reception and the splendid lunch prepared for us in Rameh, a hillside village with rich green olive groves and fabulous views.
In Bethlehem we were due for lectures in the Catholic University, with an excursion to the shrines in the lunch hour. This midday trip had to be cancelled as the previous day, after some weeks without violent action, the Israeli forces had entered the city, shot dead two young men, shot a grandmother, who was in hospital “brain-dead,” and injured a youth. Then they bull-dozed a couple of houses. As the funerals were being held the day we were there and the atmosphere in the city was very volatile, we remained on campus and prayed for the “martyrs” and the bereaved. That was an embargo that we accepted for our own good. Later in the week while we were in Nazareth, we heard of the 19 civilians killed by Israeli rocket (an “error”) in Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip, an event that briefly drew world condemnation.
This is the Holy Land, where Jesus lived and died, killed by the occupying power. Where Christians still live and die alongside their Moslem brothers and sisters. Jesus was here, in Palestine; he is still here and here he still waits to welcome us. Jesus Christ is a great part of Palestine present and of Palestine to come. He is here in the Christians who belong to him and in the Moslems who respect and revere him. Like Jesus their compatriot, the people of Palestine have a great charism of welcome, of acceptance, of giving. We find they give us far more than we can give them, and to visit them is a true conversion experience.
We won’t labour on about the stupid treatment we received at the airport as we were leaving Israel. Sufficient to say that when they suspected we’d been in Bethlehem, they took us apart in a two and a half hour security process of reiterated search, questioning and delay before escorting us to the departure lounge. (No way back). The Palestinians suffer so much more, all the days of their life.
These are just a few windows, patterns in my kaleidoscope of impressions. When Jesus was asked, “Where do you live?” he replied, “Come and see.” That is his invitation still. Just as he still invites us to drink his cup, to bear the Cross, to love our enemies. “And blessed are you when men persecute you and revile you . . .”
Mary Wood and Catherine Appleby
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