Tag: Gaza

The Pitchforks are coming…closer!

sunflowerseedspiritualityLeave a comment
person putting palm on face while holding prayer beads

I read an article some years ago (ten years ago) called “The Pitchforks are Coming...” which has come into my mind again more recently. I might describe it as arguing for the right thing for the wrong reason and I didn’t really warm to the author of it if I’m honest, but nevertheless, he made some very good points…ten years ago.

The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

With reference to the French revolution, it was a furore on TikTok, prompted by a model outside the MET gala recently who used the quote from the Marie Antoinette film:

Let them eat cake!

which reminded me of the article. The outrage her tasteless video prompted a movement subsequently called the “digital guillotine” as millions of regular people started to block celebrity and corporation social media accounts they were and were not following. The excess on display at the MET gala was juxtaposed next to a march in support of Palestine, hundreds of metres away and the fury at the video using the sound at the insensitivity and deafness to the suffering of people at the hands of a genocide, where internationally agreed, illegal and barbaric tactics of starving a civilian population are being used.

The theme of the MET gala this year was “The Garden of Time“, a short story by J. G. Ballard. it is summarised in one of the comments in the goodreads link:

“The Garden of Time” by J. G. Ballard (1962) is a short story of speculative fiction. It is about an elegant couple living in a beautiful villa. They have a garden of crystal time flowers. When each flower is plucked, it deliquesces (melts) from a solid to a liquid and then disappears. When that happens, time reverses. A mob is coming towards them, and they use the flowers to hold back the mob as long as possible.

The goodreads post has many comments in relations to the story and this year’s MET gala.

Tiktok is an interesting social media app. When I set up as an online tutor a few years ago, I was very reluctant to sign up to it, but my business coach suggested I did and I post short videos solving chemistry problems. What I have found to my surprise, not withstanding the addictive nature of it, is the degree of conversation that goes on. Sure, there are the negative and vicious comments that you see from social media trolls, but it’s not just about leaving comments. Videos can be stitched and dueted. You can replay a section of a video in your own video and comment on it or you can make your own video alongside someone else’s video in a duet. One of the most inspiring examples I have seen of the latter was of one creator who signs to songs, being dueted by other creators signing to the same song in different sign languages – amazing! Regular people all over the world, talking to each other and sharing ideas. The model I mentioned earlier was stitched many times and ctiticised, leading to the boycott of celebrities at the MET gala and those who have been silent on the genocide in Palestine.

Social media content in support of Palestine is being suppressed. I saw it for myself when I shared a video from a pastor in Bethlehem showing their crib at Christmas time. It was blacked out on my facebook page, where other shared videos were not. Nevertheless, my tiktok for you page is overwhelmed by it and I find myself unable to look away. Videos have been posted regularly from the Gaza press, directly from people on the ground, unpolished, raw. We are able to see what it is like for other ordinary people around the world, in real time. Sometimes, when one of the regulars hasn’t posted for a while, there is a sinking feeling that they have finally been killed. It feels so trite to say it so simply like that and it doesn’t convey the feeling of dread, the hoping that today there will be a video from them telling us that they are okay. And at the same time, the same sinking feeling for all of the unknown faces dying every day, including children, Mansour was missing for two weeks at one point, Bisan didn’t post for a few days, leading people to worry and ask what had happened to them. Bisan used to begin her videos like this:

Hey everyone, This is Bisan from Gaza. It’s day #no. I’m still alive…

A mural of her has been painted in Edinburgh.

There is a feeling of relief to see her post with today’s date on it.

The feeling of bearing witness to the genocide in Gaza resonates with the third week of The Spiritual Exercises for me. The grace asked for is:

In the Passion it is proper to ask for sorrow with Christ in sorrow, anguish with Christ in anguish, tears and deep grief because of the great affliction Christ endures for me.

The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius trans. Louis J. Puhl S.J.

Ignatius give additional directions:

I will rouse myself to sorrow, suffering and anguish by frequently calling to mind the labors, fatigue and suffering which Christ our Lord endured from the time of birth to the mystery of the passion upon which I am engaged at present.

The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius trans. Louis J. Puhl S.J.

I am reminded from scripture:

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Matthew 25:44-45

It is all too easy to be blind and deaf to the suffering of people in another part of the world, to think that it is all too complicated to understand and it is upsetting, and what power do I have anyway? During the third week of my Spiritual Exercises, I prayed that I wouldn’t turn away, that no matter how difficult and painful it was to walk with Jesus in His passion, I prayed that I wouldn’t be one of those to run away from the garden. In my experience of praying the third week, I came to understand that it wasn’t for me. In my imaginative prayers, whenever Jesus was struggling, and struggle He did, when He caught sight of those who loved Him, those who were walking with Him, He drew courage and strength from them. To stand in solidarity with people is not for us, it is for them. If it is hard for us, how much harder is it for those for whom there is no escape, for whom there is no turning away?

Bisan posted a short video some time ago full of hope. Hope because the voices of the student protests in America had reached Gaza. The solidarity of the demonstrations around the world were providing the people under siege and bombardment in Palestine with hope and encouragement. When so many in the world can see the wrongness of Israel’s campaign against Palestine, when the International Criminal Court has named the war as genocide, what are the governments who are still holding out playing at? When most of the world can see the obvious, why do they refuse?

One of the Tik Tok videos I watched which has disturbed me the most was of a young Isreali woman who had done her time with the IDF and was talking about the fact that she had knowingly killed a young Palestinian boy of around eleven or twelve years old. This young woman was broken: she was filled with dread and fear, like someone standing on a precipice, oscillating between trying to accept what she had done and couldn’t undo, and to feeling pure horror in what she had done. How can anyone come back form such a thing and live peacefully with themselves? Israel is not only destroying Palestinian children, she is destroying her own.

17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”[a

Matthew 2:17-19

person putting palm on face while holding prayer beads
Photo by omar alnahi on Pexels.com

Rishi Sunak, in the first few days of the election campaign has told us that the world is a more dangerous place. What can I say? He is one of the super rich minority and it seems that the chances of his party winning are far too slim. Maybe it does indeed seem dangerous to him and others like him as the hordes come over the hill with their pitchforks. I will let Nick Hanauer close from his memo to fellow zillionaires:

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when…

Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning… If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible—for everybody. But especially for us.

Vive La Revolucion!

Hope is an Act of Defiance

sunflowerseedspiritualityLeave a comment

I went to see “The Old Oak” at the cinema a few weeks ago. It is a Ken Loach film. I have a lot of respect for Ken Loach, even though I have to confess to it being the first film of his I have gone to see. He makes films that tell the stories of ordinary people living in Britain today and he shows the impact of the policies of the current government on people here who have the least. His films are not easy viewing.

The Old Oak is set in a village in Northern England, not far from Durham in 2016, prior to Brexit. The story is about the settling of some Syrian refugees into the village and the impact of it on the local people and the refugees themselves, and the relationships that develop. I’m not sure exactly why I was moved to see this film but avoided his other films on account of the anticipation that they would be gruelling, all I know is that I was moved to see it and I was deeply moved by it.

I felt angry at the blatant racism of the villagers towards the refugees and the bitterness that they espoused:

I’m not a racist but….

I felt angry at the lack of compassion and the spite that they showed to people who had been displaced from their home and who had nothing. I also felt angry at the deprivation and the hopelessness that the villagers themselves felt at being trapped in poverty in their own lives. And most of all I felt angry that these feelings had been stoked and amplified by the corruption and lies of those in the Brexit leave campaign who later came to form our government. I felt ugly inside and ashamed to be British – a strong, repulsive response. I recognise myself in the first week of the Spiritual Exercises at this response as I contemplate sin and the sins of the world.

A platonic relationship develops between Yara, one of the refugees and the publican Tommy Joe (TJ). In response to an idea from Yara, who was inspired from photos of how the community held together during the miners strike:

When you eat together, you stick together.

He opens up the backroom of his pub to cook community dinners for anyone and every one. The community pulls together to fix up the back room to make it functional for the purpose. However, some of his regulars who had asked for the back room to be opened and he had turned down due to the extensive work needed, sabotaged the room in a pique of spite and the dinners stopped.

The scene that moved me the most in the film took place in Durham Cathedral. We see a small part of that scene in the trailor for the film. Yara and TJ had gone there to collect some food that had been donated. Yara wandered into the cathedral during choir practice and the space, beauty and peace of it contrasted with the apparent bleakness in the rest of the film. She had a conversation with TJ about how her father had been abducted and imprisoned by the Syrian regime. She believed he was still alive at this point because they had had reports that someone had seen him in prison a few weeks previously. Yara talked about how this hope for him to be alive caused her despair. She conveyed that if they knew he was dead, they would know he was no longer suffering, or being tortured and that they would be able to mourn, to move on and live their lives. This conversation broke my heart, and even now as I write about it weeks later it still has the power to move me to tears. How can hope be the source of despair? An yet, there was truth in her words.

I remember the incident in London Bridge some years ago when the driver of a van deliberately ploughed through pedestrians. I’d read an article later somewhere where a mother had commented on her child asking where was God in such a thing. She had told him to look for the helpers, always to look for the helpers. This one simple response has stayed with me since then. It is the helpers and the hope for better that defies the violence that would otherwise overwhelm us.

I read somewhere – I think it was in “God in All Things” by Gerry Hughes – that as long as one person remains who stands up for what is right then evil will not prevail. As St Francis of Assisi puts it:

When I did the Spiritual Exercises, there was a meditation in the first week whereby I imagined myself in a river, seemingly teeming with life, but I was standing in front of an outflow pipe with what was effectively crude oil pouring out of it. I was trying to block it from reaching the children behind me but it was clinging to me and making me sick, and some of it was still managing to flow past me. More recently, I was in this river and in front of the outflow pipe again. This time my body was anointed in a different oil, fragranced with God and the black oil could not cling to me because of it. The words that accompanied this image in my prayer were:

Satan cannot take what belongs to God.

Evil and sin is tricky. Much has been written about it and I certainly don’t have the answer to it. The first week in the Exercises is spent in meditation of it and on contemplating the cross, Ignatius cries out in wonder:

This is a cry of wonder accompanied by a surge of emotion as I pass in review all creatures. How is it that they have permitted me to live, and have sustained me in my life? Why have the angels, though they are the sword of God’s justice, tolerated me, guarded me and prayed for me! Why have the saints interceded for me and asked favours for me!…How is it that the earth did not open and swallow me up, and create new hells in which I should be tormented forever!

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. Louis J. Puhl SJ.

Like many others around the world, I am completely horrified by the violence currently being perpetrated in the Middle East. As a species, we have an intrinsic tendency towards violence. This point never hit more deeply as when I watched the jubilation portrayed in the film Oppenheimer after the bombs had been dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was sickening. I identified with the man shown vomiting in the bicycle sheds. In God in All Things, Gerry Hughes, who took a stand against violence in his life, talks about our destructive belief in redemptive violence:

Supporters of active non-violent resistance are generally considered to be romantic idealists, who are out of touch with the realities of the violent world in which the weak and oppressed will be trampled on by the ruthless unless the ruthless are deterred by violence.

God In All Things, Gerard W. Hughes

He also says:

Our advocacy of violence is not seen as being in conflict with fundamental Christian belief. If we believe in redemptive violence, we may find ourselves in strange company; in agreement with tyrants, dictators, totalitarian regimes and terrorists throughout the ages.

God In All Things, Gerard W. Hughes

I went on a retreat to Loyola in 2009 which had been organised by Gerry Hughes and I was, and still am, impressed by this quiet, gentle Jesuit priest who held such seemingly radical views. At least, by the response they would illicit in some, you would think they were radical. You would think that condemnation of violence and calling for peace would be obvious, logical, a common desire for everyone. Apparently not. I am proud to be Scottish this week because of the call by Scottish MPs for a ceasefire in the Middle East, and I am ashamed to be British because parliament voted against calling for a ceasefire. I genuinely do not understand it – how can anyone seriously vote against calling for wanton violence and destruction to stop? I may be one of those romantic idealists that Gerry Hughes was referring to, and I may be politically naive without a solution to the problems, but still. Surely the first step to stop the killing is to stop the justification of the killing?

When the scapegoat mentality takes hold in a country it destroys any sense of proportion, threatens to banish the rule of law, tends to demonise any who are suspected, and frightens people from speaking the truth, lest they are accused of colluding with the accused.

God In All Things, Gerard W. Hughes

While I recognise a grain of truth in Yara’s words in Durham Cathedral, and agree within the context in which she spoke them, I don’t agree in a general sense. Hope is the defiance of the violence we see. It is the message of the cross, it is the message of all of those who stand for peace. We dare to hope for more than the violence we are capable of, and while there is one person alive who advocates for love, there is hope. There are many of us and the darkness cannot extinguish this light. This hope is our defiance and we dare to speak it out.