September 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Suffering and Hope--A Testimony from the Margins

Jean Zaru, Presiding Clerk of Ramallah Friends Meeting , was for a number of years the head of the Ramallah Friends Schools in Palestine. The following is excerpted from a talk she presented at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting on March 21, 2002.

I have struggled most of my adult life with issues of theology and liberation. And it has been life experience, rather than a library, that served as my source of inspiration. My life experience has taken me to five continents where, over the years, I have been enormously enriched by contact with activists and theologians engaged in various struggles for liberation. Just as importantly, my life experience is rooted in my identity as a Palestinian Quaker woman struggling to find a way of transformation in our broken world.

I have been challenged by the suffering and hope arising within the experience of the breakdown of life in Palestine--and within the experience of all people on the margins of life. The suffering and hope arise when I listen to the pleas from young people for solidarity and support. Or when I meet the blank stare of pain in the eyes of Palestinian refugees displaced for more than 50 years. Or when I recall the thousands of people who have been injured over the past 18 months of crisis and feel abandoned by the world community.

Without a doubt, the way of transformation calls us to stand face to face with the forces of death and evil, both within us and around us. It challenges us to resist the temptation to simply re-arrange
furniture, whether that re-arrangement is in the structures of our psyche or those of our planet. It is a journey about life and about the passage from death to life.

The real turning point in the liberation experience is the public voicing of pain that is often an intentional, communal act of expressing grievance. It is sometimes unheard and always includes risk but is nonetheless crucial, for with the cry of pain begins the formation of a counter community around an alternative perception of reality. Thus, the act of crying out and groaning is at once an act of subversion and an act of hope. In fact, for Jeremiah, grief is a radical form of criticism and de-legitimizing. As he publicly mourns over Judah, Jeremiah exclaims (4:19-20):

My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh, the walls of my heart!
My heart is beating wildly;
I cannot keep silent,
for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.
Disaster follows hard on disaster,
The whole land is laid waste.

If you visit Palestine today, you will hear every Palestinian's cry--man, woman and child. A cry from the depth. A cry of grief and lamentation. A cry with the hope that this grief might penetrate the numbness of history and open a way towards newness. Jesus and Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem. And so do we. The words of our prophets can be our words, describing exactly our situation and our lives. And in the wilderness of occupation, oppression, and exile, we need more than ever to look to the ancient prophets, who used grief as a critique to energize people, and to make a commitment to work for justice and peace.

Of vital importance, too, is the insistence on a prophetic ministry in today's threatened world, to expose the lies and myths that have been created, mainly by the powerful, to cover up the pain and grief. This ministry, our shared ministry, should resist the monopoly of knowledge and the power of the dominant definition. It should struggle to forge a new discourse that includes critique from the margins. Therefore, it is essential that we should make contact in each and every place with the dispossessed, the prisoners, the immigrants, and the downtrodden. We must create spaces for such people to share their stories, to grieve, to express their anger and hope.

A Japanese poet once wrote: "The world grows stronger as each story is told." We prefer truth to be simple, but every time we insist on such simplicity we diminish truth and deprive ourselves of its richness. Storytelling makes our world stronger because stories reveal the complexity of truth.

Reality in the Holy Land

I have lived all my life in Ramallah, and more than half of my life under Israeli military occupation, but it was never as difficult as it is today. Our country has become one gigantic prison and one vast cemetery. The people, land, houses, and trees have been brutally treated. Fear and insecurity have replaced compassion and trust. Relations have become hard and tense. When almost every aspect of life is framed in oppression and humiliation, moral space is diminished. Our own humanity is threatened and role models for our children become hard to find. My people need time to mourn, to heal their wounds, to pacify their children, and to find their daily bread.

The most basic form of deception is in fabricating a fake symmetry between occupier and occupied, between oppressor and victim. Last month I needed to go to Amman to be with my mother who is critically ill. I had to cross the King Hussein Bridge on the River Jordan, just as I had to do in order to travel to the United States to be with you today. Crossing the bridge is not like crossing a bridge in a car in your country, just waiting either for the green light or to pay the toll. For us, it entails moving from occupied Palestine by first securing permits, and then having our papers, identity cards, and passports checked.

Traveling from Ramallah to the bridge should take less than one hour. This time, however, it took five hours, and I had to take three different cars and three different buses. The tolls we pay at the bridge drain our lives, impair our health, and increase our separation anxiety as neither leaving nor returning is guaranteed. As they check our bodies, our shoes, our belongings, piece by piece, I always wonder if they can--with all their sophisticated devices---check our hearts and minds.

My mother often referred to Henry Nouwen's words from his book The Wounded Healer: "No one can help anyone without being involved, without entering with (one's) whole person into the painful situation, without taking the risk of becoming hurt, wounded, or destroyed in the process... (without a willingness) to make one's own painful and joyful experiences available as sources of clarification and understanding...the great illusion of leadership is to think that (humankind) can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there."

On one occasion I was visiting Jalazone refugee camp during the first Intifada after three weeks of curfew and closure. The camp residents were collectively punished by having their electricity cut off and their supply of gas curtailed. Women told me how determined they were to find a way to make their own bread. They collected wood and rubbish and made communal fire, which was kept alight by burning old shoes and rags. When the Israeli soldiers came to put the fire out and throw away the dough, the women resisted shouting, "Go tell your leaders that no matter what you do, we will not allow our children to starve. We will find a way to bake bread, and all your efforts to destroy our spirits are not going to succeed. What God created, no one can destroy!" What a testimony!

I had the same feeling of hope in spite of the woundedness and destruction at Ground Zero in New York City when I was listening to the stories of some American pastors this past October. One man who was assisting as a hospital chaplain said, "I spent so many hours comforting the wounded and their families, and embracing their children and then it dawned on me: Why had I never thought of embracing the dying children of Iraq?"

Hope in Community

I find it difficult to retreat into a hope that centers primarily on the individual and heaven beyond. Rather, I find hope in communities of people and their movement towards liberation. The experience of the everyday world is an essential part of the knowledge of God. In the theology of liberation, the primary text is "reality"--the reality of oppression, poverty, and circumstances. Knowledge of that primary text makes theologians out of all God's people.

Often I am not satisfied or bound by the letter or scripture alone for that must certainly be subordinate to the inner understanding that comes through the Spirit. The claim to inspiration by the Spirit of God is a central theme of the New Testament. Access to the Spirit was open to all; it disrupted the reality of those who sought a monopoly on truth. The way of Jesus takes radical Christianity back to the Gospel story of nonviolent protest and the implementation of the reign of God on earth. Jesus rejected resort to violence as an instrument of change. However, that should by no means lead us to suppose that he held a passive attitude to the circumstances that confronted him.

My vision for peace must be reconciled with the many accusations that Christians have failed to promote a just peace in the world, and more seriously that Christians have collaborated with injustice by encouraging the poor and the oppressed to patiently accept their misery, promising abundant rewards in the after life. I am quite familiar with this conception of faith. All it does is alienate the human being from his or her proper task in the present life and induce irresponsibility.

Our road to renewal is to be "truth-tellers," not to cover up. Cover-up is the tool of our contemporary culture. Half-truths and lies fill government halls, institutions, and media. As Jeremiah declared, "They all deceived their neighbors and nobody speaks the truth; they have taught their tongues to speak lies." (Jeremiah 9:5) It is our duty to tell the truth, to uncover our scars and wounds. This requires great courage, yet it is the way by which we disarm the principalities and powers whose lies and deceit are fed by our silent cooperation. Only through nonviolence can the truth be known, for truth is incompatible with violence.

I walk alongside many others in my journey of struggle and carry with me hope to move from oppressive and destructive power, to liberating, life-enhancing power. We should not be interested, as women or as Palestinians, to simply transfer power from men to women, or from Israelis to Palestinians. Rather, what we should struggle for is the transformation of our communities:
From militarist, coercive power to the power of mutual trust;
From ethnic and religious exclusiveness to the celebration of diversity;
From racist and sexist discrimination to the protection of human rights and humanity for all;
From neutrality and objectivity to compassion and ethically based priorities;
From exploitation of nature to gentle cooperation with nature;
From God above to God within;
From death to resurrection.

You might say I have high hopes or false hopes, especially when the experience of oppression and war have for generations been in my land and suffered by my people. But if there is hope after such a brutal death of the resurrected Jesus Christ, then there surely is no situation devoid of hope and promise. I leave you with the words of Cardinal Suenens:

Who would dare to say that the love and magination of God were exhausted?
To hope is a duty not a luxury.
To hope is not to dream, but to turn dreams into reality.
Happy are those who dream dreams and
Are ready to pay the price to make them come true.

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