The Spirit of Peace

Pentecost and Affliction in the Middle East

Mary Grey

• Publisher: Sacristy Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781908381200
• eBook ISBN: 9781908381705
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whatever happened to the Arab Spring?

Not long ago there was the dawn of a vision of peace and justice in the Middle East. Just a few years later that vision seems to have vanished and instead there has been a renewal of new threats of violence between certain Middle Eastern peoples, especially against Middle Eastern Christians. In this book, Mary Grey asks how the Holy Spirit is leading us to a new future, for all these people: Christians, Jews and Muslims. God's outpouring Spirit must be seen as the power of resistance to evil. Pentecost lifts up the renewed hope that ever promises new energy for justice and peace.

"Mary Grey dares to look closely at the appalling affliction of the Middle East today, and there find signs of the Holy Spirit at work: enduring, healing, reconciling, and imagining a new peace. She offers us brave hope in this awful time of darkness and suffering."

— Fr Timothy Radcliffe, OP
Author; Director, Las Casas Institute, Blackfriars Oxford

"In a deeply inspiring way, Mary Grey explores the journey of the Spirit alongside struggling people through their affliction. She traces the multiple dimensions of the Spirit in the Gospel story as well as in contemporary times. A journey of hope towards peace."

— The Revd Dr Naim Ateek
Founder, Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, Jerusalem

"The Spirit of Peace is an inspirational and courageous work, written with immense care and a clear love of the Middle East. Mary Grey's emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit reveals a crucial dimension of faith dynamics in the Middle East. In that part of the world, we desperately need the work of the Holy Spirit to enlighten and inspire us so that we may understand our history better, face our challenges, and build a future where Christianity can continue to be a beacon of the love of God in the birthplace of our faith."

— The Revd Nadim Nassar
Director & co-founder, The Awareness Foundation, London

"In The Spirit of Peace Mary Grey has done what few Christian theologians in the West have dared to do: to apply the insights of Christian Liberation theology to the suffering of so many people in the contemporary Middle East. In so doing, she reminds us of the powerful contemporary relevance of this approach to Christianity and challenges people of all faiths and none to really allow in to our hearts and our consciousness both the suffering and the ground for hope in what is sometimes dismissed as an intractable problem."

— Rabbi Michael Lerner
Chair, Network of Spiritual Progressives, and Editor, Tikkun magazine

Chapter 1

Doing theology in Ayacucho: forsakenness and affliction as themes for Christian theology in the Middle East

As I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul . . .

In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific and irreducible . . . It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery.

Simone Weil [13]

What has affliction as a theme to do with Ayacucho? How can Ayacucho have any connection with the Middle East? Ayacucho is a mountain village of great poverty and violence in Peru. The village was renamed Ayacucho by Simón Bolívar after the battle of 1825; a Venezuelan political revolutionary, he led several South American countries to freedom from Spanish colonialism. Today, Ayacucho has become a symbol both of suffering and hope. This is especially because the Peruvian theologian, Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez, often called “the Father of Liberation Theology”, wrote an inspirational article some years ago, “How can God be discussed from the perspective of Ayacucho?”, [14] in which he saw the poverty and suffering of the people of this village as paradigm for his life’s work in Liberation Theology.

Gutiérrez raised this challenge because Liberation Theology does not start from the abstract categories of traditional systematic theology, but begins, rather, with actual life situations of suffering and oppression, asking penetrating questions about the structural causes of these. The conviction that God is on the side of the poor is the lifeblood of this theology. Gustavo Gutiérrez faces with courage the challenge of the very possibility of talking about God in such a desperate situation:

Is it possible to talk about a God who wants justice in a situation of poverty and oppression? How can the God of life be proclaimed to people who are suffering premature and unjust death? . . . What language can be found to tell those who are not seen as integral persons that they are sons and daughters of God? [15]

How to talk about Christ, too, is part of the challenge. Does believing that Jesus Christ is Liberator, breaking the chains of oppression, really empower the struggle of ordinary people for justice? Liberation Christology proclaims that Jesus not only suffers in solidarity with the desperate situation of impoverished people but is a powerful source of hope that freedom and flourishing will be experienced in their own lifetimes. [16]

The ideas explored in this book are inspired by questions raised in “How can God be discussed from the perspective of Ayacucho?”, and I face Gutiérrez’s challenge from the context of Middle Eastern Christianity, now struggling for its very survival.

Readers may, of course, respond that a better example and a city more universally well-known for poverty and suffering might be, for example, Calcutta (Kolkata) in India, or Sarajevo at the height of the Balkans War. Sadly, examples of poverty-stricken cities abound in every continent and have always done so through the ages. What has changed is that this context has now become a new jumping off point for Christian theology. This is not to say that there have not been many great people concerned about poverty and injustice in the history of Christianity. On the contrary, the simplicity and concern for poor people of saints like Francis of Assisi are the bright stars of our past. Yet the life work and commitment of Gutiérrez has blazed a trail for many theologians from different continents who place the call to justice and liberation at the heart of their theology. And this has become a promising new start for a theology embodying the very integrity of commitment to working for justice. This new starting point has been encouraged by the election of Pope Francis in 2013 who has declared that he wants the church to be a Church of the poor and for the poor. This aim continues to be an inspiration even beyond the boundaries of the Christian Church.

Engaged theologians like Gutiérrez see theology as a “second level” act. The first act is praxis, or committed, active theology, meaning a concrete solidarity with suffering communities and a struggle for justice with them. Theology then reflects and inspires the next level of praxis, or reflection on this struggle and engagement, giving rise to new action. But a deeper look at the context of the struggle and suffering is required. For that I first turn to Simone Weil—cited at the beginning of this chapter.

Affliction as starting point for the Middle-Eastern context

Figure 1: Simone Weil [17]

Simone Weil was a sensitive, brilliant French philosopher and mystic of Jewish background, who lived through the events of the Second World War in solidarity with the French working class in occupied France. She struggled to be in solidarity with working people by labouring long hours in a factory, which almost ruined her health. Leaving France for America, she was immediately called back to serve the French provisional government in Britain and sailed for London. Yet she still insisted on sharing the hardships of those she had left behind in France, refusing the extra nourishment prescribed by her doctors. Her health soon worsened and she was admitted to the Middlesex Hospital in April, 1943, later being transferred to a sanatorium in Ashford, where she died of tuberculosis a few months later. [18] Although she was a person of deep faith and prayer, she never formally became a Christian, feeling strongly that her vocation was to one of “waiting” and witnessing from this stance.

Her relevance for this exploration is not so much her own spiritual journey, for which her writings are still considered spiritual classics. It is specifically her reflections on affliction, situated as they are in a context of German-occupied France and in her first-hand experience of the annihilating effects of poverty on the entire human spirit.

The comparison with Israel/Palestine/Gaza is obvious at a superficial level, given that the Occupation of the West Bank has lasted over forty-seven years. The resulting poverty and worsening humiliation of the Palestinians has been well-described by many writers in detail, by Palestinians themselves, by Israeli commentators like Gideon Levy, and by Western analysts. [19] But all too often this sounds like a never-ending catalogue of woes, and we are unable to take in and to respond to the complexity of issues involved. Can we reach a better understanding of what Palestinian people endure on a daily basis by reflecting on what Simone Weil writes about affliction?

What Weil—writing from her own context—reveals, is the woundedness of affliction which is at a far deeper level than that of mere physical suffering (emphasis is mine):

The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction. It is not surprising that the innocent are killed, tortured, driven from their country, made destitute or reduced to slavery, imprisoned in camps or cells, since there are criminals to perform such actions. It is not surprising that disease is the cause of long sufferings, which paralyse life and make it into an image of death . . . But it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to take possession of them as their sovereign lord. [20]

Affliction, she writes, gives the experience of abandonment and forsakenness. It hardens and discourages us:

. . . Because, like a red-hot iron it stamps the soul to its very depths with the disgust and even the very self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement which crime logically should produce but actually does not. [21]

Affliction makes God appear absent for a while, “more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell”. [22] Affliction made the crucified Jesus cry out: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15.33–34). But, ultimately, he died with a cry of faith on his lips. The Biblical figure of Job, Weil believes, was an afflicted man. Affliction makes him cry out against God and curse the day of his birth (Job 3.11, 20–23).

Gutiérrez—in another work—also invokes Job not only as an afflicted man, but as a just man, for whom concern for justice was the supreme value of his life. [23] Indeed, Job gives one of the most radical analyses and insights contained in the Scriptures as to the oppression of the poor by the powerful:

The wicked move boundary marks away,
They carry off flock and shepherd.
They drive away the orphan’s donkey,
As security they seize the widow’s ox.
The needy have to keep out of the way,
Poor country people have to keep out of sight.
Like wild desert donkeys, they go out to work,
Searching from dawn for food,
And at evening for something on which to feed their children. [24]

Finally, as the Book of Job tells us, Job is vindicated. He has not discovered the meaning of suffering—nor did Simone Weil—but he is rewarded for his faithfulness and steadfastness, and is brought to a new understanding of the freedom of God’s love. [25]

The second connection with the situation of the Palestinians is that affliction describes their situation of humiliation, poverty, and violence. Again, I wrestle with Gutiérrez’s question: how to speak about God in this context, how is God present except as absence? This liberation theologian, with a lifetime of commitment to seeking justice for some of the poorest and most abandoned people, writes:

Some years ago, J. B. Metz, with great human and Christian sensitivity, asked how God could possibly be discussed after the horrendous experience of Auschwitz. Centuries ago, Bartolomé de los Casas stated that he had seen Christ scourged a thousand times in the Indians of Latin America; in the same context, I ask how God can be discussed not after but during Ayacucho! The question undoubtedly implies more than our capacity to reply. [26]

How to speak about God now, during this situation of escalating misery, encapsulates the very poignancy of this book’s search. But there is an added dimension: this is that it is frequently the horrendous scale of suffering of the Jewish people in Auschwitz and many other death camps in the Second World War, as a result of Hitler’s policies, that causes a certain blindness and denial as to the present suffering of the Palestinians for which the Israeli government is largely responsible. [27]

Affliction evokes not only the daily suffering of the people of the West Bank and Gaza, and the forgotten Palestinians in Israel, [28] the stalemate as to peace talks, and denial of the right of return of the refugees to their homes (a right enshrined in United Nations Resolution 194), [29] but also the denial of the truth of what actually happened in the Nakba, “catastrophe”, the driving out of 800,000 Palestinian from their homes in 1948 and the loss of 533 villages. [30] Israel continues to date the Occupation from 1967.

According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, two manifestations of this denial have to be confronted. The first was the fact that international peace-brokers side-lined the Palestinian cause and concerns from any future arrangement or agreement. The second was:

The categorical refusal of the Israelis to acknowledge the Nakba and their absolute unwillingness to be held accountable, legally and morally, for the ethnic cleansing they committed in 1948. [31]

Israel’s insistence that nothing prior to 1967 will be included in any negotiations totally removes the right of return of the Palestinian refugees from any peace negotiations. We are drawing close to the heart of what affliction means in this context. The Israelis seem unable to acknowledge the trauma they inflicted on the Palestinians in 1948, and this is in stark contrast with the Palestinian narrative which they live to this day as ongoing affliction. The denial of memory—or memoricide, as Pappé calls it [32] —is an insidious form of persecution. Yet it is impossible to kill a people’s memory. As Philippe Gaillard, head of the Red Cross delegation in Kigali, wrote in the context of the Rwandan genocide (1994):

You may kill as many people as you want, but you cannot kill their memory. Memory is the most invisible and resistant material you can find on earth. You cannot cut it like a diamond, you cannot shoot at it, because you cannot see it; nevertheless it is everywhere, all around you, in the silence, unspoken suffering, whispers and absent looks. [33]

All the attempts to remove evidence of the ancient Palestinian villages, to rename them, [34] to forest the area in order to conceal them, and to forbid any reference to Al Nakba in Israeli school textbooks have failed to eradicate its memory. Murals of their old villages are painted on the walls of refugee camps, as I have witnessed in Bethlehem. Survivors of Al Nakba still sleep with the key of the front door under their pillows in hope of returning home. Nakba Day is commemorated each year on 15 May. But to have the truth of the past denied public acknowledgment is affliction indeed. It is not unlike what—from a completely different context—Korean Minjung theology describes as han. Minjung theology developed in the 1970s out of the suffering and oppression of South Korean Christians. Han is described as the feeling of deeply internalized lamentations and anger. It can be accumulated, transmitted, and inherited, boiling in the blood of the Minjung people. But in the case of the Palestinians, affliction is endured or sustained not only with anger, but with a growing Christian spirituality inspired by the concept of sumud.

Palestinian sumud —a source of strength for an afflicted people.

Sumud is an Arabic word meaning “steadfastness”, “perseverance”, and “resilience”. Originating in a political context in the 1970s, it now has a rich development in Christian contexts as a grounded source of strength for the people: sumud functions as an umbrella term for many ideas. It means being connected to the Palestinian land, to home, and to daily life. It symbolises the value of a “peaceful life under the olive tree”, as well as appreciating the beauty and joy of life. But sumud also points to broader causes and to the community’s struggle. It can express willingness to sacrifice and suffer if need be, and calls on Palestinians to stay resilient like a cactus in the desert.

1. The spirituality of sumud brings together many of the aspects of a praxis of justice and reconciliation: beginning in the experience of affliction, it is nonetheless situated in relational theology seeking justice and peace. Spirituality in its simplest meaning is the life of the Spirit, embracing the human spirit, the human zeitgeist (spirit of the times), the energy grounding hope, itself linking with the Divine, the Universal Spirit of life that is shared by all faiths. But the meaning of spirit that unites a struggling people in the most literal way is the Spirit as breath of life grounding hope.
2. Taking a deep breath in this Dark Night of the Palestinian people, and of many peoples in the Middle East, means, firstly, connecting with this spirit, calling on resources for the long haul, refusing to give way to the suffocating effects of daily humiliation. [35] Drawing deep on the Spirit, the breath of life, is keeping hope alive.

Secondly, taking a deep breath brings the gift of living peacefully when there is no peace: this means calling on a type of imagination that is prophetic...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Whatever happened to the Arab Spring? The threatened situation of Christians in the Middle East.
• 1. Doing theology in Ayacucho: forsakenness and affliction as themes for Christian theology in the Middle East
• 2. Gaza in history and in contemporary reality
• 3. Syria, the Arab world’s broken heart
• 4. Out of Egypt have I called my son
• 5. Breaking the impasse I: The Holy Spirit as bridge-building and creating dialogue.
• 6. Breaking the impasse II: The experience of women and the Holy Spirit as beauty
• 7. From old Jaffa to Caesarea—the Spirit leads into the future!
• Bibliography
• Notes