This post is about religion, so if you're not interested in religion, perhaps this post is not for you, or maybe because you believe religion is rubbish, it might be for you after all. Everyone who knows me knows that I've been transfixed by the conflict in Gaza. I'm still not sure what I should call these events because conflict implies two groups with relatively equal strength pitted against each other, which is certainly not the case. Targeting areas teeming with starving unarmed civilians, half of whom are children, is hardly balanced. But this is not the place to talk about my unforgivable failure to define and describe what is happening around me.
This is a post about faith, so I should say that I am a Christian, but not in the way people typically think about Christians, especially in a Western context. Having grown up in Trinidad and Tobago, with its multiplicity of gods, it is more difficult to ignore that God can manifest in any way He chooses than simply accept that I do not understand his way. I believe in a Creator-God, who made everything that I can see and all the things I cannot see, but most importantly, who made me. In my most profound crises of faith, when I was most likely to not believe, this truth - that I was made - has sustained me. I also think that God, omnipotent as He is and beyond understanding, has found different ways to talk to people. How or why would the maker of time and place be bound by human context? Why would I believe in or follow a God whose actions were limited by my understanding? Often, I try to explain it in terms of all the other elements of creation: snowflakes, millions of them, are unique; butterfly species, also millions, are also unique. I think uniqueness is a line in God's signature. For these reasons, I am never put off by people who believe in something I do not believe in or choose to live as though they believe in nothing. I often think God has found a way to speak to them that I cannot yet understand. And yes, those ways of worship and communion are bound up in culture, politics, and time. Even as the way I understand God and what he is capable of is limited by my current place in the universe, my relationship with the Creator is absolute. It precedes my relationship with myself. I know Him, and I know that he knows me.
What I am seeing in Gaza is not so much about the existence of a Creator, nor is it an attempt to understand what that Creator might be doing. This reflection is not an attempt to understand where Jesus, who I believe in, might fit into this. Those are questions that I have, but that's not what I'm talking about here. This musing is about how we shape our existence in response to an understanding that a Creator exists. Here, I am concerned with how people process and enact the knowledge that they have been created by a named universal force that is sentient and capable of acting in relationship with them. What I have discovered is that the responses of people in Gaza to violence have been a Masterclass in faith.
I cannot list the number of videos that I've seen in which parents are holding the bodies of their dead children and saying, "God is great," or "Thank God." Two stand out to me. In one, a father, a doctor working at a hospital dealing with broken bodies all day long. He is told his son has been found, and the camera follows him through a crowded corridor and upstairs to a room where a journalist scrolls through the pictures that he has taken of the dead. The father describes his son, and the journalist says to him, "I brought that body in." The child's mother is not present when this is said. In the next shot, the mother can be heard asking for her son Yussouf. A few frames later, the father goes to what is probably a makeshift mortuary. His walk to the final scene begins as a long shot in which he is 10 feet away from the door at the foot of a metal ramp that goes up into the mortuary. He stops and holds onto the railing as the reality of what has happened settles on him, but he is soon moving again. We, the viewers, see him gradually fall apart second by second. And there is a sense of shame that because the only thing we can do is witness, we are forced to invade these very private moments. Looking at him deliberate over whether he should move forward or not, I wonder if he registers that he is being filmed. The confidence for which physicians are known begins to slip off of his frame. If you've ever seen a doctor moving through a hospital, there is an air of certainty about them that may be read as arrogance. They appear to be in control of so much more knowledge about what is going on in the body than the layperson. In fact, a physician's bedside manner can easily be reduced to how gently they can transition us from ignorance of our suffering to understanding how it can be stopped.
Not so with the father in the blue scrubs. He has begun to sag under the weight of the impending proof of death and is being held up only by the nature of his skeleton. Now the mother is there too, and a little brother. As the white plastic is pushed away to reveal the child's face, there remains no doubt that Youssef is dead. This man, the absolute power of his position in this time and place, has been reduced to a flickering aura. There is nothing he can do. "Give me a minute," he says and begins to walk toward a door. His son lashes out at him and screams, "Youssef, Youssef!" The mother wails wordlessly, as mothers do. Under the noise, you can hear "Thank God" uttered from the doctor's retreating figure.
I do not think I know a single person in my life, and I know many believers who, in that moment, could even think to utter, "Thank God." The scene is replayed on social media again.
This time at another hospital. It has been captured for us on film once, twice, three times, but it is happening all day, even when there is no one to film it for our edification. Another father peeks through the curtains, eyes blank and glazed. The doctors are treating his daughter. She is perhaps six. The father asks, "Is she breathing?" The doctor turns to him and calmly says, "Say thank God." This moment is an exemplification of faith that Christians are taught over and over again. It is actually written in the biblical text, "Give thanks in all things," and we quote it. We say it in church. We read it in the prescribed readings. We say it, especially when things are good. But in this scene in Gaza, it was a mandate from the doctor. As part of this faith community, the unnamed father must recognize God and his goodness with gratitude before he learns what has happened to his daughter. The outcome is immaterial.
I have faith. I have known tremendous grief, disappointment, prejudice, lack of affirmation, and anxiety. I have had depressive episodes that have lasted weeks where all I could do was weep and weep and weep. Often, at the onset of the episodes, after the anger that triggers them has passed, I look to God and say, "Father, I know that you are there. Can you help me?" But he doesn't come immediately, not in a way that I understand it. I have attempted suicide in that interim. I've called out to God more than once and believed I had not been heard. I have destroyed friendships. I have harmed myself in ways you cannot imagine, on my own, with the assistance of others. In the empty space of waiting, it is possible to believe that God will not acknowledge, far less answer us. There are moments of doubt when I wonder if I am insane to believe in this sky daddy, in this thing I cannot see. Have I created it? Is it in my mind? Is anyone coming to help me, or have I convinced myself that someone is coming to help me so I wouldn't have to face the reality that I'm not being helped? And in those moments, the furthest thing from my mind was "Thank God."
It is too much to recount here, and I believe that once one has been forgiven of an infraction against God, the worst thing one can do is bring it up again, so I'm not going to dance the litany of blasphemies that have passed my lips in moments of rage, and in the emptiness of what I thought was abandonment. Instead, I will say that I have repented, ultimately not because I have been rescued but because sorrow has passed. For me, repentance is not sackcloth, ash, and weeping. It is the welcome home of the prodigal. It is the father saying, "It's alright. I know what you did. You hurt me, but you were angry. Come back to me. I am not angry with you. I will never be angry with you. Even at your worst, you belong here with me, and I'm so happy you decided to come back." It is God's relief that he gambled with free will and won. We will not be separated from Him forever. When I come back, I realize my error and wish I'd have said "Thank God" in the midst of the pain. My judgment becomes clouded in my distress, and I cannot say "Thank God" because I haven't practiced enough. It is still a deliberate, reasoned choice effort to remember that I have a creator, that I have not been abandoned, and that even if I feel abandoned, that He does all things well, that His will is perfect. Shamefully, I have responded like this to a break-up, a stormy meeting with Human Resources. I react like this to silly things. Even as I have known great grief as an adult with a knowledge of God, I have never had to calculate where I stand in the universe while holding the rigid body of my own child. I cannot imagine what that is like.
There was another video circulated on Instagram, a montage of the pointed fingers of children's corpses, and at least two children who are dying and wagging their fingers, reciting the words, "I testify that there is no God but Allah." Children have found God in the face of death, and mothers and fathers thank God in the face of calamity.
I will take several lessons from this time. I'm assuming that I will live long enough to have this conversation with my son and others. I'm assuming there will be a world to live in, and this will become a part of its history. I will take away a new understanding of oppression. I will take away a new understanding of courage. I will also take a new understanding of faith, what it means to live in faith, and what it means to exercise that muscle to the point that it becomes a reflex. While some people might call it brainwashing, I consider it mastery. I challenge anyone who thinks that others have been brainwashed to be brainwashed in this way to test its efficacy. To find the full, deep, excoriating trust that supersedes all I might feel, think, wish, or expect to happen. It is now a pillar of my personality. I am sorry that I only just learned. I'm sorry I didn't understand what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but I understand now, and this is one of my gifts from Gaza.
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