A pall of silence hangs over most of our churches. Prayer platitudes: Communion comforts, soothing sermons, finding ways to look away. From horror. Out of sight, out of mind, over there. Somewhere rainbow reticent. Our felt world unchanged, as the earth tilts further off balance, eighty something years after Auschwitz.
We now create our own, updated Zones of Interest. But with essentially the same purpose: of masking the truth of what was going on ‘behind the wall.’
However, the story from far away still seeps through. Live stream screams on handheld screens. Until the signal fails. And not only phones go dead.
But my first sentence is inaccurate. It’s shamefully, mostly the Protestant Churches. There are explanatories for that – but no excuses. We still, largely, ‘read across’ our allegiances here to either side there, in Israel/Palestine. And that reverberates back. Deepening division. A liberal unionist told me that, ‘The extreme left and the nationalists have weaponised this issue to use as another stick to beat the Unionists with.’ Yep, that’s the meaning for sure.
Or, on the other side of our binary equation, the finger-pointing, shouty condemnations. ‘Just like the illegally occupied Palestinian Territories, the British illegal occupation of the North remains here.’
Perhaps if we enforce the ‘correct’ ideological line, like Settler Colonialism, thoroughly enough, that will somehow transform the political landscape?
Palls of smoke rising take me back to our own relatively minor crisis, and our Year of Living Dangerously – with its two Bloody Days. The Lebanese Civil War ran out of days to attach Bloody to. We got off light.
Back then, Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken of how black and white were ‘all bound together in a single garment of destiny” and that there was “no separate white path to power and fulfilment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity”.
Read across to here. And to Israel/Palestine. No one’s really safe unless the other exists in freedom, in dignity.
Dr King knew that the moral arc of the universe wasn’t destined to bend towards justice. But he sought to shape its trajectory towards life, towards humane values, and if there is such a thing as the right side of history, I see clearly who is standing there: the vast majority of my Roman Catholic neighbours, the ones with a moral compass, experientially shaped by decades of minority status and misrule baked into a settlement attempting to square competing claims.
Paul Bew can tell you all you need to know about that. There were reasons. But no excuses.
For that, and the continuing pall of silence hovering above so many churches, as we stop up our ears to the still small voice of a Galilean Prophet, who walked long days on the edge – insisting that even though you never get to choose who your neighbour is – you must try to love them anyway– whether they be far, or only a stones throw away.
This Sunday, the 24th August, in testament to an active laity pushing for action from their hierarchy, The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has called for collections to be lifted for practical help during “A day of prayer and reflection for Gaza and for a renewed commitment by the international community for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East”.
So, on Sunday, I’ll wander past my local chapel. Probably won’t go in, but will tip my imaginary hat and say ‘Fair Play. Save Gaza. Free Palestine.’ And hold in my mind my Christian brothers and sisters there alongside their beloved Muslim fellow citizens, friends and once neighbours. Because none of us are truly safe or free until everyone is.
Roy Uprichard is a retired teacher who has published three ‘Camino type’ memoirs:
- On (and off) The Portuguese Way. Celtic Connections – Galicia, Ireland and Everywhere.(2021)
- Stone and Water – Walking the Variante route of the Camino Portugues.(2018)
- Restless Hearts – Walking the Camino de Santiago. (2016)
You can view his profile on Amazon.
He is also a member of Christians4Palestine.
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