Spirituality

In Support of Palestine Not Hamas

Posted on by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

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I attended the Save the People of Gaza rally over the weekend. (Organized by the Edmonton Coalition to end War and Racism)

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Along with Deb and our activist daughter, we were there protesting Israeli aggression, and in support of the Palestinian victims.

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The victims were on display. Large poster-pictures, children mostly, wounded, bloodied and dying.

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But while walking through the crowd I’m conscious of a different "war." The competition for victim status. And on this front, Palestinians know they are winning. Israel’s victim status seems insignificant. And on some level, this seems fair. Easily, the Palestinians are suffering wrath of this war.

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But all is not binary. There are more than two dimensions to this conflict. And not all of the victims are the result of Israeli strikes.

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There are other voices, largely unheard of, both within Palestine and Israel, that condemn their respective sides’ action and point within. Here’s one story gleaned from the Globe and Mail, by Patrick Martin.

RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — When Usama Abu Nahel looks at the conflict in Gaza he feels nothing but contempt. He is one of the people who hate Hamas more than the Israelis do.
It was 19 months ago when Mr. Abu Nahel, then 25 and a member of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza, was dragged from his house by a group of Hamas militants, taken to one of their warehouses and "kneecapped." He was shot 30 times in the left leg, doctors said; then in the right leg six times.
"As I lay on the ground in agony, they ran over me in their jeep," he recalls.
He’d like to spit as he says this, but not in the neat room he keeps in a house for victims such as him in Ramallah.
  There are 17 men, all with stories similar to Mr. Abu Nahel’s, who reside in a sprawling house on a quiet street near the entrance to this West Bank city. About 35 other men reside in other locations around town. All were members of the mainstream Fatah movement, founded by the late Yasser Arafat and led now by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Each was seriously wounded in the fighting that raged between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza in June, 2007. They were brought to Ramallah for hospital and rehabilitative care. They have not been allowed back into Gaza, and their families have not been allowed to join them.
As a group of them gather in Mr. Abu Nahel’s room to watch the television coverage of the fighting in Gaza, their emotions come to the surface.
"Hamas works for Iran. They brought us back to the Stone Age," says Mohammed Abu Zakari, 48, who lost one of his legs after a Hamas shooting in the civil conflict. He has left his wife and 12 of his 13 children behind in Gaza. His 13th child, 19-year-old Ahmed, is with him, another Hamas victim whose ankle has been reconstructed.
"I’m happy to see them eradicated," he said, blaming Hamas for the carnage and destruction now taking place in Gaza.
Mahmoud as-Shatat, 23, a former student leader for Fatah, agrees. "Hamas consider us infidels," he said. "They brutalized us, their own people. I have no sympathy for them."
And what of the pictures on TV showing the ordinary people of Gaza being shelled?
"Hamas shoots from between houses," Mr. as-Shatat said. "They hope Israel will fire at them and kill some civilians."
An uneasy quiet then settled over the room.
Mr. Abu Nahel broke the silence: "I want those who shot me to die," he said. "But those are our families being shelled," including the fiancée he left behind in Gaza City.
"It’s more important now that Israel stop the shooting."

Poverty/Spirituality

In Memory of David

Posted on by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

To say that I knew David would be untrue. To say that anyone knew him at depth would also be untrue.

David1 I met David in 1983, on my first visit to Hope Mission as a volunteer. I was part of a group that brought a "gospel program of message and song" to the Mission’s evening service. Sandwiches and hot tea and Jesus. Not in that order.

David was my age. And in that first service, I thought I felt a connection. He responded to the message and when we gave the "alter call," he came for prayer. I lead him to a small corner office where we prayed and he "accepted Jesus into his heart." I was strangely elated. And David seemed, well, not too different. What I was looking for was a bit more exuberance. I was hoping, in the afterglow, to talk of important spiritual matters. We talked. But David, despite my steering, just wanted to talk about some of the people he met on the street, the things he saw, an altercation he had had. And so, feeling my misappropriated disappointment, we talked. Still, having come for this proselytizing purpose, I left mostly satisfied.

Our little out-of-town group came back to the mission at least once a month for six years. David was usually around. And over that time he often prayed with someone, and often accepted Jesus in his heart. In my zealous-evangelical mind I saw this as failure. Something about the process that wasn’t clicking or sticking for David. Seeds on rocky soil or a hard path and all that.

When I started to work for Hope Mission, the big-E edges began to get rubbed and chipped off.

David was around, and I got to see him more often. Sometimes daily, sometimes I wouldn’t see him for months. When I did meet him, he was rarely with anyone.

I learned of his habits, found out about his fights, his times in remand and prison, his addiction, his street life. David was not above a certain nefariousness. He liked playing people, and he had the skill for it. To say that it was simply a mechanism for self-protection would be to over-simplify. And yet, underneath, there was a pliable, longing, kid-David.

David2 Why he never got to retrieve that David, more often, is where the tragedy lies. The deep inner pathology David struggled with, the hard clot he couldn’t break up, was known only to him.

David, I was told, died on the street with a needle in his arm. A lonely death.

Looking back I often failed David. Certainly in the early years, in my gusto to see him "saved," and healed, I missed him. Seldom, through my gaze, did I give him the opening to find himself as someone enjoyed for who he was.

What David was looking for in that office all those years ago, is what we all look for. An experience to slack our loneliness. Some human eyes that tell us, we matter. Some flesh and blood contact that tell us we’re not in this alone. Something to expel the long-toothed fear that we are not accepted. Here, after all, in the meshing of our personal space, is where the Spirit of Jesus resides. 

And as for the question of David’s soul and heart, the mercy of God took care of that long before I tried to get David to really mean it, long before I tried to have him, "get serious with God."

Whether we work or volunteer in the inner-city or not, and whatever our faith, we are humanized by our engagements. That was my lesson, and in some way, David’s gift to me.

I still hope for significant social change, but I’ve found that the deeper wisdom about the possibility for change, is always found in the small everyday meetings. Most often in those things we take for granted. Never in the orchestrated, the forced, the dished out. Only always in a piece of exchanged heart.

(Check here for Hope Mission’s memorial for the street. HM group on Facebook)

Spirituality

Christian Zionism

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

It’s Sunday, the first Sunday of a new year, and all across the land, we Christians will be appareling ourselves with crosses, rosary’s and bibles and ‘going to worship.’ Many will worship in spirit and in truth, many will worship because it’s safer than reading, many will worship a custom, and many will worship and praise God Almighty to avoid having to actually meet her.

That’s because the praised God Almighty has things in control and doesn’t need my investment, other than the singing. Under control: things like places–boundaries of holy sites and nations; and things like times–Armageddon, rapture, stuff like that. No problem for an Almighty God…the only problem is us, when we fail to pick up on what’s all there in our onion skin Schofield’s and Thompson Chain’s.

emb1 Well, I’ve been failing. And, having rooted around, I’ve been chastised. I didn’t know, for example, that there was an International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, where I could learn all about the vital importance of the Israel nation, the land, the city, the temple, all the blood and soil stuff.

I had no idea that the ICEJ represents millions of Christians from over 125 countries, "who share a love and concern for Israel and the Jewish people." Now the way I wrote that it sounds like a bad thing…well, maybe it is. The ICEJ is after all the world’s largest Christian Zionist organization. And even though we hear overall reports of CZ’s dissolution, this CZ "embassy" has just had a banner year.

What this means for Israel is moral and monetary support. Sometimes the support is cautionary–there are well meaning people at ICEJ, in that there are overtures to the Palestinian’s–but it is support nonetheless. Support by groups such as Pastor John Hagee’s, Christians United for Israel, appears less qualified. And some Christian Zionists, according to author Grace Halsell, believe that "Every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God, and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us." HmPgFlag1

In any case, all Christian Zionists have deep attachment and interest in the  welfare of the state of Israel and Jerusalem. Without it, Christ can’t return, no rapture, no pleasing avoidance of the great tribulation, no victorious defeat of the Anti-Christ, no millennial reign, no fun. Now you see how Armageddon is a good thing?

No worries of course, a God Almighty has all that under control, as witnessed by the 1948 "ingathering" and the 1967 war, where Jerusalem was won back. Strings were pulled, big strings. And things remain on course.

What brings me to all this is the morning headlines of Israel’s ground invasion into the perennially occupied Gaza Strip. More civilian deaths. And Hamas, for their part, can’t bring themselves to stop the rocket launching, and will keep on fighting, affording Israel justification to "defend" and  invade.

And so it will go. And the alignments will coagulate, the freighted one of the CZ’s for Israel, and the fledgling one for Palestine.

Me? I’m always part guilty bystander. It’s so very little but this minor post is at least a way, without supporting Hamas, to confront and decry the Christian Zionists, while supporting the Palestinian victims–as well as Israeli victims.

What I strenuously seek is some floaty bit to stand on. Could it be the gospel? That contestable etching that points away from blood and soil, that makes the temple and all nationalistic and theological attachment to "holy" land null and void? Christian Zionists…could it?

Humour

New Year’s Haircut

Posted on by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

One sunny day when I was eleven, Kenny and I retrieved a large mirror from my basement, stole across the train tracks and from a perch on top of the loading dock aimed a laser beam of bright reflected sunlight over the main street, through the barber shop window, and into the eyes of Mr. N–, who at the time was giving one of his take-no-prisoner haircuts to an unfortunate. Collateral damage.

Villainous? Yes. But it was adolescent retribution with cause. The eye-blinder  was for all the pinches, puckers and nicks he put into norman-rockwell-shear-agonymy oversized ears and skinny neck over one year of forced and anguished visits.

Before each haircut I pleaded with my dad, showing my scars, revealing iniquitous horrors, but he must have had some kind of mutual commercial agreement, to wit: Mr. N– bought our Springside Shopping Center groceries, and I, with father’s coin, got his Pool Hall and Barber Shop haircuts–bloodletting thrown in at no cost.

As for my friend Kenny, he had a vested interest in the crime, although to a lesser degree; because, after a couple of regrettable Kenny croppings, his dad gave in to my friend’s protests and stopped sending him.

The barber was probably not what we had imagined him to be–part senile, part shell-shocked. But he was shaky. We assumed it was from age, or from whatever went on at the Legion.

It was the clippers’ never-to-be-changed blunt edge of the sickle that tore the skin. And whenever he went for it, snapping the electric servo into rabid life, I slunk into his black leather barber chair so far that he had to give the hydraulic foot pump two more kicks to get me back to slashing height.

But when he was on me I stayed stone-still. Only my dilated pupils moved, darting this way and that, trying not to seize on the leather strop hanging by my side, or stop at the shelf by the window where the straight razor soaked in a fluid-filled glass jar. A dermatological tailings pond.

My motionless state didn’t matter. There was hamburger to be made. And when all the cuts were stanched–some requiring time–I left shorn, but looking like I had an angry English hedgehog dragged over my head and down the back of my neck. Quitting the chair and emerging from his shop was like a scene from Hellraiser.

mebeer&hair So I didn’t feel bad, when on that bountiful sun-sweet day, he came racing out the front door brandishing a comb still dripping with blue Barbicide. Me and Kenny just flattened ourselves into specks. Mr. N–, confused, finding nothing close by, recalculated and lifted his head to our horizon. But at that distance he couldn’t make us out, let alone make the chase. So he shook his comb in our direction and retreated into his den twisting the Venetian shutters closed.

Kenny and I took an exaggerated circuitous route back to the Shopping Center, where I lived, and which happened to be right beside the barber shop. We slunk through the back door and into the basement, put the mirror back in its place, and setup living with our perfect transgression.

I’m still living with it. You see, to me, long hair was more than an anti-establishment statement, it was also a safety measure. Even now, 40 years later, I resist the shearing chair. It had crossed my mind, but I’ll not start my new year with a haircut. Cheers!

Happy New Year! Love to all!