Amos, Off Road

It's really quite simple.  Sometimes.  It's about light and dark, and the dancing of the two.  It's about dusty hills and gusty winds, and the impermanence of all of it.  And it's about people--from places like Bethlehem and Denmark, Santa Cruz and Connecticut--stopping long enough to recognize how holy it is.  The light, the dark, the dust, the wind.  And us.

Yesterday afternoon, our good friend Usama Nicola suggested an "off-road" pilgrimage, a journey into the high desert hills of the West Bank.  We'll see the Dead Sea, he said.  We'll watch the sun set, he said.  We'll eat dinner with the Bedouins.  Easy to accept an offer like that.

Jorgen and Usama, Sunset in the Desert

But it was so much more than a pilgrimage, a quick look at the Judean hills.  On our way, Usama pointed out the Palestinian village of Tekoa, a small community that once was home to the surly prophet Amos, who railed against militarism and idolatry and famously intoned: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everyflowing stream!"  Nearby, of course, is a larger (and illegal) Israeli settlement, also called Tekoa.  And this gives me pause: Would Amos have anything kind to say about the mean-spirited enterprise by which settlers take the lands of other families and deny those families basic human rights, democratic opportunity and hope?  Or what about Martin Luther King--who reclaimed Amos' prophetic word for a generation of Civil Rights activists in the 20th century?  Would King look favorably on the apartheid inflicted systematically on the Palestinian minority here?

Probably not.

Beyond Tekoa, we traded in Usama's comfortable Kia for a Bedouin LandRover.  Our driver navigated dried out river-beds, steep mountain hillsides, old camel trails.  The only settlers out here were foxes and ravens, and a long line of camels on the move.  We bobbed and bumped all the way to the steep cliffs above the Dead Sea, and then back to a special hillside as the sun set--gloriously, joyously, generously--in the west.  No checkpoints, no concrete barriers, no guns here.  Just light and dark, dancing.  And what a gift to share this desert sunset with my daughter Fiona, just days before she begins a third year of college!  What a pleasure to share it with Usama (in whom the spirit of Amos shines, even now) and new friend Jorgen Kvist Jensen from Denmark!  

These are painful, divisive, demoralizing times in Palestine, in Israel, among these peoples.  Almost everyone we meet is tired, weary to the bone, to the core.  But our weariness is not God's despair.  God shines like the desert sun, circles us daily, amazes human hearts.  And that dance is ours, if we want it.  "So let justice roll down..."