It is the day after Palm Sunday, after a long weekend, and I am riding on a bus through Jerusalem, heading home. On Saturday I went to a wedding in Hebron. With my dear friend, the bride, and her closer friends, I danced in circles around the stage, trying to imitate the sparkling women around me. With my one of my hands, I twirled my fingers and with the other hand, I struggled to keep my hijab on my head, while smiling broadly at the rest of the group who sat watching us. I must have looked so ridiculous that a little old lady finally grabbed the hijab off of my head and twirled it around with her, laughing, as we danced. The audience laughed too, and I joined in.
I wish that my friends who hate and fear Muslims could be here, could experience this.
My American friends and I had walked through the city that afternoon before the wedding, enjoying little cups of Arabic coffee and kanafe and other gifts given by over-friendly shopkeepers. Our adventures included meeting a beautiful little girl who had two scars on her cheek from a glass bottle that her next door neighbor (an Israeli settler) had thrown through her open window one night and hit her in the face while she slept in her bed. Her younger sister had been hospitalized for 6 months from an injury to her head when a settler threw a stone at her. These things go practically unnoticed and certainly unreported in Hebron. The Israeli soldiers who patrol the settlement areas do little or nothing when these things happen. The little girl remembered me from last year and shyly gripped my hand, smiling up at me in a way that broke my heart. “She wants you to come and spend the night with us,” her father told me. “Please come. You are welcome!”
It is the day after Palm Sunday, after a long weekend, and I am riding on a bus through Jerusalem, heading home. On Saturday I went to a wedding in Hebron. With my dear friend, the bride, and her closer friends, I danced in circles around the stage, trying to imitate the sparkling women around me. With my one of my hands, I twirled my fingers and with the other hand, I struggled to keep my hijab on my head, while smiling broadly at the rest of the group who sat watching us. I must have looked so ridiculous that a little old lady finally grabbed the hijab off of my head and twirled it around with her, laughing, as we danced. The audience laughed too, and I joined in.
I wish that my friends who hate and fear Muslims could be here, could experience this.
My American friends and I had walked through the city that afternoon before the wedding, enjoying little cups of Arabic coffee and kanafe and other gifts given by over-friendly shopkeepers. Our adventures included meeting a beautiful little girl who had two scars on her cheek from a glass bottle that her next door neighbor (an Israeli settler) had thrown through her open window one night and hit her in the face while she slept in her bed. Her younger sister had been hospitalized for 6 months from an injury to her head when a settler threw a stone at her. These things go practically unnoticed and certainly unreported in Hebron. The Israeli soldiers who patrol the settlement areas do little or nothing when these things happen. The little girl remembered me from last year and shyly gripped my hand, smiling up at me in a way that broke my heart. “She wants you to come and spend the night with us,” her father told me. “Please come. You are welcome!”
The next day, on Sunday, a small group of us stood at the base of the Mount of Olives and watched the jubilant crowds descend the mountain, palm branches in their hands and songs on their lips—some joyful, some somber, some wild. Like so many others in Jerusalem of old and Jerusalem today, I’m trying to find Jesus in the crowd. I’m overstuffed with information, hard facts and hurtful realities. This is how I always feel over here—my mind and heart are on overdrive, a slow burn as I try to process everything. This unglossed reality sometimes draws me closer to Him, and just as often acts as a wedge between myself and God. The God in whose name so many cruelties are committed, some knowingly, some ignorantly.
We join the pressing crowd making its way past Gethsemane to the Lion’s Gate. Drums bang, bells ring, songs in various languages overlap with each other, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes not. French, Arabic, English, German, Hebrew, Finnish, Polish, Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese, Swahili.
Today, I need my King. Some say this is where Messiah will come (either the first or second time, depending on who you ask) and the Mount will split in two. From this spot, the resurrection will begin. In anticipation of this, tombs have become very expensive on the Mount of Olives, some people paying millions to be buried here.
I am utterly agnostic on that subject. I just want the hem of his garment, right here, right now.
We pass a large banner recognizing the 800 year anniversary of St. Francis meeting the Sultan of Egypt. While Crusaders marched to Jerusalem, armed with words and weapons of violence Francis had a different idea. Unarmed and poor, he crossed the Mediterranean, seeking dialogue, friendship, understanding, peace. His gentleness and intentional vulnerability impressed the Sultan and he was graciously received. He spent some months with the Sultan, enjoying his hospitality and returned to Europe with a smaller and truer word than the armored message that was carried by flags and banners and swords and spears.
I’m heading back from class at Hebrew University today. We’d been watching a video on the plight of the Negev Bedouins, most of who’ve been shuttled off against their will to massively overcrowded and impoverished “townships” while the others fight for their villages to be recognized, some of which have been leveled by Israeli bulldozers tens of times. “Why are they being so inhumane? Al Araqib existed here before Israel was a state! They can bulldoze us a hundred times and we will rebuild a hundred and one times!” cried an ancient mukhtar, his grey mustache curling over his mouth.
I must have been the only one in the class who gasped at the next scene: Rory Alec from God TV standing near the same village. “The Lord said to me, ‘Prepare the land for the return of my Son!’” he cried, gesturing to rows of trees that God TV has paid for, trees planted on village land, an upcoming forest in the barren landscape that will uproot the Bedouin and somehow hasten the return of the Lord.
"Sow a seed for God!" he said, adding, "I tell you Jesus is coming back soon!" And then he handed an oversized check to the Jewish National Fund, a group that plants forests in Israel, some of them built to disguise razed villages beneath them, yes, even razed Christian villages in the north.
Apparently, Jesus can’t return until all the Bedouin are swept out of the open country and into squalid cities where they can no longer ride their horses or keep sheep or plant gardens.
I have to spit the bitterness out of my mouth. Help me, Lord.
I open my kindle and continue a book I just started, called “Chasing Francis.” It is about a disillusioned Evangelical pastor who finds himself on a pilgrimage in Assisi. The pastor finds in Francis strange and yet compelling friend. In his journal, he writes a letter to him:
“I still don’t know if you were a genius or a lunatic or both. Kenny says you were God’s lover and that people who are in love should be forgiven for their excesses.”
“…You were God’s lover.”
Before I have time to absorb the sentence, tears are flowing out of my eyes and I am full-on sobbing on the bus. And once I start, I can’t stop. Embarrassed, I turn my face towards the window.
I see myself in my mind’s eye; the me of a few years ago, the me of decades past, me walking through grass, praying and singing. I remember how He lifted me from His quiver, fit me into His bow and released me through the air. How I straightened myself as I flew, knowing that His aim was true. “Hit the mark you desire, Lord!” I’d sung, feeling myself in His very windstream, the Arrow of the Lord. Oh, so many songs I’d sung, songs that flowed endlessly and made my heart feel so big that it encompassed all creation and I was suspended inside it; His heart.
And this moment I can feel it again, the wind whizzing above and beneath me.
“Am I still Your beloved? Am I off-course now? Am I still the one who sang to you in the wilderness? Can You still hit the mark with me - in spite of my anger? Tell me again--what do You want me to see here, to understand here, to know here, to do here?”
I’m wiping away my tears. Because I know I have failed here in so many ways. I’ve not kept the way of grace. The anger has hurt me, of that much I am certain. It makes me snap at innocent people who are ignorant of the reality here. It profoundly alienates me from that whole world that is projected by God TV, a world I once dwelt in, a world that is no longer and can never again be my home.
2000 years ago, you rode defenselessly into Jerusalem, your eyes freshly filled with the tears you’d shed over the city, your very body an eternal bridge across every chasm of alienation.
800 years ago, Francis, in imitation of you, crossed an ocean and built a small bridge between east and west, a bridge that we can still walk over. And how many others since then? Jewish sages, Christian mystics, Muslim lovers-of-you?
This land has a way of either fattening you in incense and oil and shrill creeds--or, like a scalpel, cutting your faith down to the barest bones.
That’s where I am now, whittled. Though I cannot deny that I love You still; maybe all the more in the midst of what You've made me see. Its hard for me to understand why You keep letting us mar your visage beyond all recognition and drag your name through the mud but I find that my heart still trusts that even over these bare bones, dead bones, dry bones within me and around me--this violent impatience, these unceasing tears, these brutal ideas of who You are and what You want--You will lovingly and patiently and faithfully wait.
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