Walls and Bridges

We left the relative tranquility and cultivated landscape of Galilee on Sunday morning, having worshipped together. We were headed to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, on Sunday afternoon and then all day Monday.

Little did we realize just how dramatic it would be to cross over into a very different landscape in every sense. We entered the hilly, rocky desert, and were soon in the West Bank, which was once part of Jordan and is mostly home to Arabs but is controlled by Israel. Well away from official Israeli territory, our guide pointed out an isolated settlement that Jews have built, quite literally up the hill from Palestinian shacks that had been denied the water and electricity that now flowed to the new settlement.

Over the past two days, we have crossed 8 or 9 checkpoints. The political reality of modern Palestine was brought home very quickly. The most dramatic of the crossings is captured in the photograph here--which is political art on the wall that now separates Jerusalem from Bethlehem. "To exist is to resist."

I found it impossible to see this person's protest--and not reflect on the obvious parallels to the Jesus story we had just been retracing. We had entered Jerusalem on Mt Olive, to a spectacular view of the wall of the old city, and the Jewish and Muslim cemeteries outside the wall. We walked down the hill to the garden of Gethsemane, to remember Jesus' agony on the night before the Romans crucified him for his own protest against the established order.

Today we had the rare tourist experience of seeing modern Bethlehem rather than just the tourist sites that we will see tomorrow. We visited Dheisheh Refugee Camp, where 12,000 Palestinians live, and two amazing organizations that serve the Palestinians--the International Center of Bethlehem with its Diyar Consortium, and the Wi'am-Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center. Both of these organizations are led by charismatic, visionary leaders, are supported by Christian ministries and are clearly making a difference to those who have no choice but to make the best of a reality that they feel otherwise helpless to influence.

I have so many feelings and can't begin to express them all. I'll close by describing the scene at the International Center, which I will never forget. A 23-year-old woman named Angie, who is the communications director, showed us the center--which exists to preserve, shape and revitalize the Palestinian culture. It is a place of beauty and healing, where students make documentary films, couples can get marriage counseling, and the elderly find meaning and community. Angie seemed much older than 23. She walked us through the temporary art gallery in the lobby, where children ages 6 to 16 have put their drawings and paintings up in a contest. The first one that caught my eye showed a dove crying onto the Palestinian flag. Simple scenes of guns, tanks and bullets became completely profound as drawn by the hand of a small child, dealing with the trauma. Some of the scenes were hauntingly similar to those writ large on the wall itself--as in the photo pictured here.

From the lobby, we moved into a workshop, and Angie told us the story of this place, where students had gathered in 2002, after Bethlehem was bombed and a strict 40-day curfew was lifted. The children had been challenged to turn their despair into hope and opportunity--and they gathered broken glass and made them into iconic angels. Katharine and I were both broken open, and looked at each other in tears. Here at last, it felt, was a bridge, not a wall.