Easter 1990: A Religious Convergence

By Brother Patrick White

My windows are not clean. The winter rains and the fine dust from the Khamseen winds that blow cold off the desert have left an untidy brown film of dirt on the large panes. The magnificent panorama of the desert and the distant Mountains of Moab are obscured. Shall I clean the windows? If it rains again I would have wasted my time. I decide it is a time to clean.

For Easter 1990 something is happening which takes place only about every 16 years. The Jews are celebrating Passover during the Christians' Holy Week. This year, too, the Christians of both the Eastern and the Western churches celebrate the Risen Christ on the same day: a rare occurrence for the churches in Jerusalem. And as I meet my Muslim students unofficially (our university has been closed by the Israeli occupation authorities for nearly two and a half years) they are tired and weak, not just because of the strains of the intifada, but because of the rigorous daytime fasting of the holy month of Ramadan.

At a time of hope, of preparation for celebration and to commemorate deliverance and a break with the past, Jerusalem is filled with contradictions. In Israel, division, acrimony and a government in disarray delay the peace process. It is ironic that the Israelis commemorate their deliverance across the Red Sea from slavery in Egypt when today they are building a military base at Dahlak on the islands off the coast of Ethiopia to control access to the Red Sea. In Jerusalem, the seven Christian patriarchs remain divided. And daily, though their 28-month-old intifada is overshadowed by momentous events elsewhere, Muslim and Christian Palestinians protest against the unlawful annexation of East Jerusalem, and the military occupation of the adjoining West Bank.

The political battle over the land is paralleled by the theological discussions over the apparent Biblical claims, justified after the event by the way the promise was described, that the land was given by God to the Jews.

Recently a Rome-trained theologian and colleague of mine has been struggling to reconcile the concepts implied in the ideas of a "Chosen People," "The Covenant" and "The Promised Land" with the realities and injustices that surround him each day. He says he no longer sees the "Land" as part of the "Covenant." He believes that if we treat the Biblical texts in the way we approach literary forms of the creation narrative in the Bible, we see the appropriation of the lands by Moses as simple smash and grab tactics. He quotes from the relevant passages of St. Paul and the letter of the Hebrews about the "New Covenant," the break from the old to the new which came when Christ died for all, tearing down the walls of hostility so that there were no longer Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, men and women.

I am not satisfied. He is a trained theologian, why the certainty now? It was, he said, his visits to the Makassad hospital in East Jerusalem that finally convinced him. There, he met a 13-year-old Palestinian boy called Mansour. As this little fellow struggled to move on his hospital bed, my colleague could see that both Mansour's legs were blown off, one hand was missing, his face blackened and pock-marked and he was, at that time, totally blind. Mansour was one of nine members of the Abu Sneineh family injured as they sat together eating a meal in their Hebron courtyard when a Jewish settler lobbed a hand grenade over their wall.

Despite the hatred and violence, Jerusalem has witnessed renewal of the hunger for peace by both Israelis and Palestinians this year. I joined in the human chain for peace that ushered in 1990 by encircling the walls of the Old City. I stood with thousands and sang "shalom," clasping the hands of a young Israeli student on my left and a Palestinian woman, wearing her traditional dress, on my right. We sang and released thousands of balloons into the blue sky.

On the 20-minute drive back through the road blocks to Bethlehem in the West Bank, I still retained in my mind's eye the colors of the massed balloons rising in the late afternoon sun above the proportioned rectangular walls of Jerusalem's Old City. It occurred to me that I had never looked at the walls in that way before, or felt so moved and full of hope. The white shirts we wore were emblazoned" 1990, Time for Peace." And that reminds me: my windows. The rains have gone and spring is here.

Patrick White, a member of the Catholic international teaching institute called the De La Salle Brothers, teaches at the Vatican -sponsored Bethlehem University in the West Bank.