SABBATICAL 18: "Walls, Tables and Beloved Communities"

Tuesday Morning, My View

It's a few minutes past ten on a Tuesday, and I'm working in a shady courtyard at Wi'am, the Palestinian Conflict Transformation Centre in Bethlehem, my home away from home this spring.  There's a cool, brisk wind coming up out of the Aida Refugee Camp, nearby, and it clears out the cobwebs of another poor night's sleep.

Above me, not twenty yards from this picnic table, is an IDF tower, set into the apartheid wall, where it separates Palestinians from Jerusalem, and from Rachel's tomb.  And even now, I hear the radio chatter up there, Israeli soldiers monitoring whatever dangers, threats and movements they wish in the streets and neighborhoods below.  Or maybe they're just playing video games.  

Greta, #gazafreedomflotilla

I'm told that, from time to time, soldiers will fire rubber bullets into Wi'am's olive trees, or at children playing on swingsets.  Once in while, they spray skunk water at women and men here, leaders gathering for mutual support in a time of genocide.  Just 45, 50 miles from where I sit, US-funded jets and drones are bombing Gazan neighborhoods, forcing mass migration, killing civilians.  A friend here insists he can hear the bombing from his front door.  In the Mediterranean, Huwaida Arraf, Greta Thurnberg and others are sailing this way, a Gaza Freedom Flotilla, determined to break the cruel and calculated naval blockade on Gaza's Palestinian communities.

Breakfast, Tuesday

Inside, we've just finished breakfast, which was more like dinner as far as I'm concerned: a feast of the best falafel I've ever tasted, fresh pita, all kinds of salads and hummus and eggs with tomato and fresh egyptian cucumbers.  Strong coffee to start, tea with sage and mint to round it out.

My companions are staff members here at Wi'am and local friends and supporters; and their conversation dances across many dishes and their own faces in an Arabic that's far too quick for me to catch.  In a moment, they''ll be laughing at something wildly funny; then they'll pivot quickly (and without a tipoff) into something much more serious and sad (Gaza, perhaps, or the cost of living, or a Houthi rocket shot down over Jerusalem last night).  But breakfast stretches deep into the morning, and conversation leaps this way and that, bringing broad smiles and then bewilderment out of friends who rely on one another.  For everything.

"Make tea, not walls..."

And I'm moved by a kind of awareness: that this, at this table, is freedom.  Whatever else this grotesque occupation does to these friends, however menacing and restrictive its walls and checkpoints--at this table they are free to needle one another, to celebrate one another, to question everything, to enjoy the fruits of a land they love.  And perhaps this is why they linger around it--this liturgy isn't forced or rushed, this kind of freedom is precious and grace-given.  So they sit and talk: mediators, women's advocates, healers, attorneys, shop keepers and a refugee from Gaza.  And the table before them is a promise made by a higher power, and a reason to clear the plates, clean up, and do the hard work love requires.  When so much sadness and death crowds their city, their land, their people.

This has to be a kind of holy communion, right?  A eucharist, a beloved community...

I like to tell my friends at church that we miss the point when communion becomes 'transactional'--as in, I do this, I perform in this way, I get something in return.  Instead, a community like this one in Bethlehem comes to tables like this one to be 'transfigured' and 'transformed.'  Over and over, a discipline, a practice, a kind of surrender.  Ordinary conversation becomes sacred prayer.  Sadness shared becomes motivation.  Pita and hummus become the body and blood of a resurrection that is not distant or merely theoretical--but here, now, embodied, and inviting in us all new life and Christ-like resistance.  Let it be.  Dear One, let it be.