Abaondonment, Love and Forgiveness in the Desert

On September 29, 2004, masked Israeli settlers attacked and brutally beat me and a colleague while we were walking Palestinian children to school in the West Bank village of at-Tuwani. Using sticks, chains, and their boots, these Israeli extremists critically injured my knee, fractured my elbow, punctured my colleague´s lung, and inflicted cuts and bruises on our faces and hands. We were accompanying the children as members of a Christian Peacemaker Team violence reduction project in the Palestinian community.

I still feel a good deal of anger toward Israeli political culture that allows a gang of Israeli settler men to target Palestinian school children and their escorts with impunity, and toward my own government, which continues to look the other way in the face of massive human rights violations against Palestinians from Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But I also emerged from the experience with a much more profound trust in God, and a greater understanding of what it means to forgive. Getting beat up so badly in Palestine may have been the most profound spiritual event of my life.

In those moments right after the attack I was the most vulnerable I have ever been. I was bleeding, scared, and could not walk. 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 I am amazed that either of us was up for it emotionally. He could barely breathe and I could not stand up. But when I look back on it now, I think that our initial offering of prayer was crucial to the process of letting go and forgiving later. In a moment when we felt alone and abandoned, prayer focused us on the presence of God, who never abandons us.

I am certain now that God never abandons us; it is we who abandon God. In the Latin, “abandonment” is the root for "desert;" e.g., to desert someone. We act as though God does not exist, and instead believe that we can remain in control. We do not trust God. In Christian spirituality, the desert is a symbol for abandonment of self, of ego, of control, and of our inordinate attachments to things, or money, or success. In the desert, through prayer and penance, we turn 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. But instead of abandoning ourselves, trusting in the desert, we abandon God.

The attack left me 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. I think we often order our lives around the fear of something like that happening. We fear death, pain, suffering, loss of control, or something happening to our children. So instead of seeking what God calls us to do with our short time on this earth, we make decisions based on our fear of loss, clinging to our lives rather than abandoning them to God.

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 the illusion of control over my life. I certainly was not in control at that moment. I know now 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 all that will seem important is that I loved, I gave myself away, without counting the cost. And that is exactly what we were doing with the children that morning.

Someone told me shortly after the attack that I “had” to forgive the attackers. I think that this nudge, 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 into who I am and what I accept as true, then I probably would have been angry instead of accepting 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 would look 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. 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 did not feel anger toward the individuals directly. I wanted them caught and prosecuted, not out of a desire for revenge, but because I hoped 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 Israeli authorities to continue to investigate the crime. 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 I see the violent actions of settlers on the West Bank happening as a result of their collective trauma. So I could, in a sense, empathize and identify with them.

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 and their government to accept the responsibility and consequences for what they did, and for what they continue to do in the West Bank, but I do not want them harmed or destroyed emotionally or physically.

I returned to at-Tuwani nearly 6 months after the attack, to continue the work of accompaniment. For me, it was important to return to at-Tuwani that first time, 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.