Reflection From the Desert II

Reflection From the Desert
On September 29, 2004, along with a colleague, I was attacked and brutally beaten by Israeli settlers while walking Palestinian children to school in the West Bank village of at-Tuwani. Using sticks, chains, and their boots, these Israeli extremists severely injured my knee, broke my elbow, punctured my colleague´s lung, and inflicted cuts and bruises on our faces and hands.

I could write a whole article about the politics behind what happened that morning, about the extremism that permits a gang of Israeli settler men to target school children and their escorts with impunity, about my own government´s support of a failed policy. But that is not this article. This article is a reflection on my spiritual journey subsequent to the attack.

Getting beat up so badly in Palestine may have been the most profound spiritual event of my life, and my hope is that my reflections will help all of us to think a bit about the spirituality of trauma and forgiveness.

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. The first thing that happened was that my colleague made his way over to where I was lying on the ground, and we prayed for the attackers. It was his idea, and when I think of it now I am amazed that either of us was up for it emotionally. He could barely breathe and I could not stand up. I remember feeling irritated about the obligation of having to pray for those who had left me in this condition. But when I look back on it now I think that offering of prayer was a key to the process of letting go and forgiving later. Also, in a moment when we felt alone and abandoned, prayer focused us on the presence of God, who never abandons us.

I am certain that God never abandons us; it is we who abandon God. 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 symbolic meaning for Christians. And the attack took place in the desert. And because there is reference to abandonment in the Passion.

We abandon God, over and over. We act as though God does not exist, meaning that we 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 person of faith be always in the desert, always in that prayer of abandonment of self in order to attach to God. The minute we leave it, all our old desires, attachments, and impulses to try and control everyone else come back.

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. 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 to do the same in others.

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. I think we order our lives around a lot of fear--fear of death, of pain, of suffering, 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 reach for 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.

In the aftermath of the attack, I had to let go of control over my life, because I certainly was not in control in that moment. 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 we were doing that morning.

Someone told me shortly after the attack that I "had" to forgive 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 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 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 as a first step I decided to reflect on my feelings toward and about the attackers.

When I probed my deepest feelings, I realized that I never felt any anger toward them. 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 the end, I was told they had no leads, because we could not identify the attackers.

I think that the reason I have not felt anger or desire for revenge is that I have been able to understand the attackers as victims. Jews have been systematically murdered for centuries, and the violent actions of settlers on the West Bank is happening as a result of their trauma. So I could, in a sense, empathize and identify with them.

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 and empathy 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.

I returned to at-Tuwani nearly 6 months after the attack, to continue the work of accompaniment, to ensure that Palestinian children are able to get to school unharmed, and that Palestinian shepherds are able to graze their sheep unhindered, and that Palestinian farmers are able to plant and plow without the constant threat of violence from the nearby settlement. For me, it was important to return to at-Tuwani that first time, for closure, and because I needed to know that the attack, and the attackers, had not taken control of my life. I was still me, still able to do the same work, still good at it. The night before I returned to at-Tuwani I had a dream in which I felt embraced by God. I knew then that everything was okay, that no matter what happened, God would never abandon me.