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Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: “May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers.” (Psalm 122:6-7)
There’s a Greek Orthodox church and school in Beit Sahour.
The Palestinian town sits just east of Bethlehem and south of Jerusalem. Its
name, Beit Sahour, means ‘house of the watchers,’ near Shepherd’s Field where a
few sheep roamed a near hillside when I last visited, 18 years ago.
The scene has faded in my mind with the years, but two
faces are as clear as the day I first met them, George Sa’adeh, the principal
of the school, and his 12-year-old daughter, Kristina, whose dark eyes shimmered
from a photo near his desk.
Amid the sickening bloodshed in Israel and Gaza, I wonder
if George is still there and whether his heart is as true, as good, as holy …
and as wounded … as the day I first met him.
I’ve heard it said that in love’s service only wounded soldiers
can serve. If so, George is a general in that gracious force, or should be.
Two years before I met him, Israeli soldiers mistook his
car for that of a terrorist and a command was given to shoot. Countless rounds
riddled the vehicle, and George was shot nine times. His wife and oldest
daughter were also shot multiple times and carry shrapnel in their bodies. But Kristina,
shot in the head, is forever 12, shining in a more elevated sphere than we, the
earth-bound, can yet imagine.
George’s qualification for love’s army is not, however,
his grief, but what he and his wife did with the sorrow that lacerates their hearts
and always will on this side of the veil. The bitterness of a soldier’s
mistake, killing your daughter, is easily enough to fire a life of endless
hatred.
But it didn’t. ‘My wife and I, with our faith in Christ,
we managed to continue our life,’ George told me. ‘I have faith Kristina is in heaven
with God. The pain, with love, we will make it something for others. We are
against killing. If I create hate in myself, it will destroy me and others.’
After Kristina’s death, George and his wife began meeting
regularly with a group of other parents, Palestinian and Israeli, all who have
lost children in the internecine conflict that once again stains the land with
the blood of the innocent and sentences human hearts to lives of interminable sorrow.
They talk, tell stories of their children and grieve …
together. ‘It’s the only club in the world that doesn’t want new members,’ George
told me on my first visit. And no one in those gatherings, I am willing to suggest,
forgets the common humanity that joins them to every other soul in the room beyond
the boundaries of race, language, faith and bitter history, for its as clear as
the tear-stained cheeks and weary weight of interminable grief in the eyes of
souls who might otherwise have never met.
I don’t know if George’s group managed to continue meeting
through the years, or if it is even possible for groups like it to meet amid the
seething anger and fear that seizes the souls of the peoples of that land.
But I hope they can. And if not now, soon, for a sense of
our shared humanity teeters on the verge of extinction, if it has not already
expired among Jews and Palestinians in the land we call holy.
And not only there, but here, in our cities’ streets, on
college campuses, in neighborhoods where synagogues and mosques, Jews and Arabic
peoples are threatened by benighted hearts who cannot see what George and those
who meet with him know all too well: We all love our children and hunger for respect
and want to be free from fear to seek the lives God so graciously gives us.
Sooner or later, the bombs will stop falling in Gaza, missiles
will cease flying toward Tel Aviv and the fighting will quiet, at least for a
time. In the lull, I pray bitter enemies may be able to look at each other across
the littered landscape and, perhaps, for a moment, see at least a shadow of
themselves in the fearful faces of each other.
George and his friends in Love’s tattered army can show
us how it’s done. They, alone, know the way of peace.
David L. Miller
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