Reflection From the Desert I

I have been using this time in Bolivia for reflection on the events of my life in the past 2 years or so and what they mean for my future and vocation. For that reason I have not spent a lot of time sending analyses of the political situation in Bolivia (although God knows, I am capable of that).

So, here goes. Getting beat up so badly in Palestine may have been the most profound spiritual event of my life (I say "may" because really, there have been a lot of profound spiritual events, and who can place a value on them?). I have talked to many of you about different things, but I feel it is time to write something down. Maybe I will throw in a few comments about the political situation in Bolivia alongthe way! My hope is that my reflections will help all of us to think a bit about the spiritualityof trauma and forgiveness.

One thing I have spent a lot of time thinking about is why I did so well emotionallyafterward. I have never exhibited any symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, never had any bad dreams or flashbacks, and did fine when I went back to Tuwani later. I have only ever had one dream about the attack, and it happened the night before I left to return to Tuwani for the first time. I will spare you the details, but it was a healing dream, a survival dream, a dream that made manifest the presence of God. For me, it was important to return to Tuwani that first time, for closure, and because I needed to know that the attack, and the attackers, had not taken controlof my life. I was still me, still able to do the same work, still good at it.

But why? On the one hand, I have no clue, but on the other hand, I have some ideas based on some of the things that happened right afterward. One thing I think I understand is that in those moments right after the attack I was the most vulnerable I have ever been in my entire life (I was bleeding, scared, and could not walk), and so what happened right then was really important. The first thing that happened after Chris made his way over to where I was lying on the ground (and called for help) was that we prayed for the attackers. It was his idea, and when I think of it now I am amazed that either of of was up for it. He could barely breathe and I could not get up. I remember thinking something like "why the hell would I want to do that in this moment." But anyway, we did, and when I look back on it now I think that was important in the process of letting go and forgiving.

It also helped us to focus on the presence of God,who never abandons us. I am certain that God never abandons us; it is we who abandon God. It seems likea paradox, but I was never so aware of the presence of God, the love of God, than I was in those moments after the attack. Part of that was the prayer, but another part was Diane and Piergiorgio reaching us as quickly as they could. (Some of you may remember this part of the story from when it happened.) I experience, then and now, their act of coming out to be with us while we waited for an ambulance to be a profound act of love. Waiting for them was when I was the most frightened, because I knew that our attackers could be lurking in the trees, and that they could get the 2 of them as well. They were in serious danger, and unlike me and Chris when we set out to walk the kids to school that morning, they knew the danger theywere in and they came anyway. It was an abandonment of the self for the sake ofthe other. It was like Jesus going to Jerusalem.

I have reflected a lot on that word "abandonment," because in the Latin it is the root for "desert," (i.e. to desert someone) and desert has alot of symbolic meaning for Christians. And the attack took place in the desert. And because there is a lot of reference to abandonment in the Passion. We abandon God, over and over. We act as though God does not exist, so that we can and must control what happens because we do not trust God. So in that sense God is always in the desert, always abandoned.

In Christian spirituality, the desert is a symbol for abandonment of self, of ego, of "attachments" as Ignatius would say, and of control, and turning ourselves over to the will of God, which by definition means service of others. I think of being in the desert as bringing the interior self, who is one with the will of God, to the surface, to become that person on the outside that we all are in our deepest interior selves. This can happen only through abandonment of that exterior self, and abandonment can only happen through prayer. This prayer that leads to liberation from our attachments is the desert.

But really, just as God is always in the desert, so must the personof faith be always in the desert, always in that prayer of abandonment of self inorder to attach to God. The minute we leave it, all our old desires, attachments,and impulses to try and control everyone else come back. All this from the fact that I did not get abandoned in the desert!

Love and trust are also important here, meaning what they are and why they are so hard for us. We do not trust God--we think we are in control--and therefore we do not trust each other. Instead of trust, it seems to me that we spend our time trying to get everyone else to be different than who they really are, and trying to get them to do our will. I will spare you all the dreadful stories of me doing this--but I think we all have similar stories. Just as we are afraid to abandon our self and allow God to work in us and become us, we are afraid to trust God todo the same in others.

In CPT work, we have to trust each other, because our lives are at stake. But Iam not sure we do, and I am not sure that as an organization we are doing the inner work that would make it possible. I did not experience that happening in training, nor have I experienced it in our so-called retreats. The thing is, not only do we have to trust, but we also have to be worthy of trust. In other words, we all have to be willing to not abandon the other in the desert, and I am uncertain that I could be sure of that with every CPTer.

I think it is the reason that sometimes, it seems to me anyway, CPTers are unwilling to take the risks that we say we are willing to take in our projects. We do take the risks in Tuwani for sure. I am interested to see how much of it we do in Colombia. I know that I am willing to take the risks, but not if I cannot trust the people I am working with. And therein lies the heart of the problem in CPT right now. For the CPT Palestine folks reading this: I have come to understand that the heart of my problem with Luna was that--for good reason and with hard evidence--I did not trust her not to abandon me in the desert.

For reasons that I cannot explain, I walked (well, actually, was carried) away from the attack with a much more profound trust in God. Perhaps it was because I went through what most would describe as their worst nightmare. I could have been killed, and had the attackers wanted to kill us they would have. And....? It is all okay.

I think we order our lives around a lot of fear--fear of death, of pain, of suffering, of prison, of not being in control, of something happening to our children, of not being valuable or valued (most especially the latter). So instead of trying to touch what God calls us to be doing, we make our decisions based on that fear. And I have been liberated from much of my fear. I imagine that it does not take getting beat up to get to this place. I think that is what it took for me.

Not to say that I am not dealing with some issues. I have an irrational reaction each time I see someone running toward me on the street, whether or not they are wearing a black ski mask. There are kids in La Paz walking around polishing shoes,and they all wear black ski masks, and for that reason alone they scare me. People holding anything that looks like a stick or a chain scare me. Etc.

But for some reason, insteaad of the attack making me more afraid of trusting other people, it has made me more willing to. I think it is because I have had to let go of control over my life (I certainly was not in control in that moment) and to accept that as a fact. I am not in control, of my own life or the life of anyone else. I am doing the best I can, and so is everyone else. I know that I cannot control whether I live or whether I die, that life is short,and that all I have that matters is my time. At the end of my life, whenever that is, I know that all that will seem important is that I loved--gave myself away--without counting the cost. And that is what Chris and I were doing that morning.

I feel like this is way too long, but I also feel like I need to add something about forgiveness. Someone told me shortly after the attack that I "had" toforgive the attackers. I do not know if this was helpful or not. I know I resented anyone telling me I "had" to. But I also think that this, in combination with my Catholic faith and its emphasis on forgiveness, got me thinking about forgiveness really quickly. I think if I were not Catholic, meaning that if forgiveness was not deeply ingrained in who I am and what I accept as the truth, then I probably would have been angry instead of accepting of the early advice to forgive. And I think that if we do not forgive, then the crime, or the offense, whatever it is,takes us over and prevents us from moving forward with our lives. The offense, or the offender, is in control of us, instead of God.

So I wanted to forgive. I realized that I had no idea what forgiveness looked like in a situation like this.I felt I understood what it meant to forgive (or not to) in personal relationships, with people I know well, or in a work situation. But I had never experienced the need to forgive people whom I had never met and could not identify, and who had committed a crime against me.

So I decided to reflect on my feelings toward and about the attackers. I realized that I never felt any anger toward them. I have no idea why. It just is not there. I wanted them (and still do) caught and prosecuted, not out of a desire for revenge, but because I feel that it would deter other Israeli settlers from equally violent actions. I tried hard, for as long as it seemed to make sense, to get the US Embassy to pressure the Israelis to continue to investigate. In theend, I was told they had no leads, because we could not identify the attackers. I do not have any strong feelings toward them one way or another. It so happened that randomly Chris and I were the ones walking the kids that morning. They were not targetting me but my presence.

I have also been able to understand them as victims. Perhaps that is due to my previous work with Soviet Jews denied permission to emigrate (the amusing irony is that so many settlers are former Soviet Jews whosecause I took up for several years). Jews have been systematically murdered for centuries, and the violent actions of some settlers on the West Bank is happeningas a result of their trauma. So I could, in a sense, empathize and identify withthem.

I do not know if all of this adds up to forgiveness. When I experience forgiveness in personal relationships, I experience it as love. I do not feel love for the attackers. I feel compassion, though, and empathy, and I wonder if compassion andempathy are the same thing as love when it comes to a person one does not know. I want them to accept the responsibility and consequences for what they did, but I do not want them harmed or destroyed emotionally or physically. I hope it is enough. For those of you with the stamina to read all this, I welcome your comments and reflections.