On one of the last days of summer, swallows coast the currents. Where a kite might fly…

Swallows skim the path, gone in a flash. Soon they’ll leave – towing the dreams of summer south, far from St Saviour’s Parish Church, set here above Greyabbey’s Gothic cloisters of ruined stone.

Rooks caw-call the hours to roost. Light seeps a little. Tired leaves set for a fall. As our tilted world spins through the void on its sun circuit. Its angular balance enabling seasons. Too far and it’s chaos.

On one of the last days of summer, swallows coast the currents. Where a kite might fly.

Our swallows will soon soar south, from our occasional steeples of local difficulty, through Spain and Sahara to Southern Africa, whilst their Eurasian cousins will navigate a land bridge commencing in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, a Rift Valley where Europe, Asia and Africa meet; where wings in Autumn and Spring weave through colour-blazed, kite-shivered skies. Where a child’s eyes raise high. In elation. In a moment’s respite. When, like uncaged birds, all is wild and free. The kites are mostly Diamond-shaped. Their frames like little crosses lifted up to sky—thousands of them.

Strange how the emblem of Empire’s power to torture and humiliate came to symbolise sacrifice, forgiveness, and refusal of the myth of redemptive violence. A symbol resounding still through time, as judgement on the Bronze-Age literalism of origin texts, where our love of violence, projected onto deity, is marshalled to permit impunity, still. No coincidence that textual literalism is always the weapon of Religio-Ethnic Nationalism.

On the penultimate day of Belfast’s Fleadh, a small gathering heard Peace Activist Mercy Aiken recount how, two Millennia ago, people may have reacted to the spectacle of an itinerant teacher on a cross. Some mourned the cruelty; others passing by perhaps showed some sympathy and stood to watch for a while, thinking that the violence was excessive, but moved on to daily routines in preparation for the Sabbath. Others preferred to point, laugh and mock this unlicensed Rabbi.

She then asked a question. ‘Who, today, is on the cross?’ On the Lynching Tree? The Olive Tree?

Perhaps one people amongst many might be found where the Rift Valley begins.

‘And what is the reaction of the many watching who now wear crosses clasped round their necks?’

In a tragic conflict of competing rights, it’s been said that the victors become the guilty and must make amends to the defeated. But this secular truth requires both the will and a means of enforcement. No such alignment as yet exists, which might hasten the fortunate circumstances we here enjoyed in the 1990s.

We know that as far back as 1948, Hannah Arendt foretold that an addiction to militarism would see the newly minted State of Israel descend into a Sparta – eventually producing its own imitative (as she would later term it) ‘Banality of evil.’

Perhaps we saw a glimpse of it this week in the cartoon villain-ish scowl of Defence Minister Israel Katz, announcing his Jihad on paper, string, and Gazan children. The ones who might unleash Terror Kites towards adjacent Israeli settlements. In deadly threat to a nuclear-armed, regional super-state.

Their flight anywhere in the shrunken 30% of Gaza behind the yellow line will now be punishable by missile or drone strike. It seems 20,000 plus (and counting) dead children aren’t enough. No number may ever be. But, as Youval Noah Harari recently observed, ‘You can’t rely only on force. If you see others only as a threat, then someday you have to conquer the whole world.’

Well, step by step then.

But when the baseline of a moral order is shredded, even our attention-deficit world (apart from its cloth-eared elites) begins to tilt and turn away from such a project, from such a hyper-vigilant forever war Joshua State. Growing numbers are now sceptical of a framing, that, as Daniel Klein recently pointed out, ‘whilst two thousand years of ancient memory supposedly gives Zionists an absolute right to return to a sovereign state on an ancestral homeland… 2000 years of continuously rooted presence gives Palestinians no such right to remain on theirs.’

Such Bronze Age ethics repurposed for the 21st-century were again exposed this week; where, in one of many actions by groups such as ‘Rabbis for Humanity’, whilst offering a ‘protective presence’ to besieged Palestinians in their West Bank homes, were pepper sprayed and beaten by masked, formerly ‘at risk’ Hilltop Youth – repurposed for Pogromist activity, accompanied and protected by the world’s ‘Most Moral Army.’ Where the pain of the ‘Lost Boys’ is repurposed and displaced onto the ‘lesser souls’ of the ‘unchosen.’ Those today pinned to an Empire’s cross.

But tonight, overlooking Strangford Lough, the light suddenly leaches. A sepia-tinged, single swallow soars high. A curlew’s echoing cry. The only ‘murder’ is a mob of crows beneath gold-washed sky.

Here, midst stone ruined only by time, I imagine a multicoloured kite flown high and remember a portion of a Joy Davidman poem (wife of a certain Mister Lewis).

‘May they see with unwounded eye, for once a gentle thing fall from the sky.’

This place inherited the first draft of belief, etched also in stone, when, with Empire in retreat, and the Legions withdrawn to Rome, a Celtic church blossomed throughout the four corners of our archipelago. In places like Lindisfarne, Iona, Bangor, Nendrum. Places and people that refused to look away from the cross – that sought freedom for the enslaved, and cherished, especially, the image of the Beloved disciple John, leaning against the breast of his Rabbi on their final evening, listening for the heartbeat of God. That pulsed into life the first non-violent, non-tribal Way, emerging from Judaic roots but spreading out to encompass all.

We live in a land that, like a palimpsest, contains multiple drafts. Where the stories of the past can be overwritten, yet never fully erased. Invariably, traces are left behind, ground deep into its fibres. All are part of its story. For no land can ever be owned by any particular ‘us’, but rather, we by it.

For Musab Sami Salim Qasim, who will always be nine.

In 2011, Gazan children set a world record, flying 12,350 kites simultaneously.

For information on local Parishes’ ‘Twinning’ initiatives with the West Bank, please visit christians4palestine.org