I’ve been reading about the ancient Egyptians recently. When they mummified a body, preparing it for the afterlife, they retained all the vital organs except one that seemed to serve no purpose. Because Egyptians believed that human beings thought with their hearts, they threw away the brains. Not a bad idea. Our world needs more heart than brains.
Thinking with our hearts…it’s our nature to be compassionate. Compassion, however, is fragile; with anger or fear it dissipates quickly, like smoke in a fresh breeze. You and I can vicariously experience the joy and suffering of others. We can feel deep concern for someone we’ve never met. It’s that capacity that has inspired our noblest thoughts and actions.
Compassion is double edged; it can foster a sense of solidarity or it can also cause pain: people may actually appropriate the pain of others as they watch them suffer. Compassion is a divine attribute. Some theologians believe that God actively suffers as humanity is suffering.
Today, in Israel, a group of women, Jewish mothers, have responded to the spirit of compassion: these women dream that Israel’s sons will not lose their souls to violence, and that their sons will one day turn violence around. These three hundred women are helping to make this happen. How? The way Jewish mothers always have: they check to see if their sons are behaving, and if they’re not, scold them and make them feel awful.
The atmosphere at the checkpoints in Israel is volatile. The young soldiers, long exposed to violence are understandably tense. The hostile environment corrodes compassionate instincts and begins making the soldiers brutal. A group of Israeli women, reports Associated Press, don’t like what’s happening, not only to Israel’s sons who serve as checkpoint sentries, but to the Palestinians with whom the soldiers deal daily. The women see Israel’s sons and the sons of the Palestinians losing their souls. These “Jewish mothers” who call themselves ‘Checkpoint Watch’, stand watching at the several checkpoints, monitoring the conduct of their soldiers, and aggressively confronting them when they see any treatment of Palestinian or Israeli citizens that seems cruel and unnecessary.
Now, in Israel, the women of ‘Checkpoint Watch’ take their places at the various checkpoints, carrying menthol cream to treat tear gas burns and toting mobile phones to complain of abuses to senior commanders. They are usually unwelcome. What boy wants his mother around while he’s trying to do his job?
One woman, Latar Szeintuch, 60, told a soldier who’d shouted at a handicapped Palestinian that she was concerned for him, that she’d seen him become increasingly short tempered during his two week stint at the checkpoint. “I don’t want to hear you,” the soldier exploded, kicking his foot against a concrete block.
Aya Kanyuk, 43, walked in front of a soldier’s rifle to prevent him from shooting Palestinian boys throwing stones. In her absence the next day, soldiers shot a 16 year old. When she learned of it, she wept. Another woman ran toward a soldier warning him not to hit a boy he’d just slammed against a wall. The soldier backed off. In short, the women of ‘Checkpoint Watch’ try each day, to witness to compassion, in a world immobilized by the insane logic of power and control.
In the Middle East over two thousand years ago, into a world of violence, Jesus of Nazareth was born. Jesus was a Jew, educated in Jewish schools, was called rabbi, died and was buried as a Jew. Jesus had a Jewish mother. In Jesus’ mother, and in the three hundred Jewish mothers today, we have a witness to the meaning of compassion.
For us Christians in the western world, it was the Middle East that formally revealed the God of compassion. The stories in the Jewish and Christian scriptures narrate the story of God’s love for us, his children.
At Christmas, we Christians celebrate God’s compassionate light as we see it shining through Mary’s son, Jesus. At about the same time of year, the Jewish festival of Chanukah is observed. Chanukah celebrates God’s miracle of light; only one day’s supply of Temple oil miraculously became enough to illuminate the Temple for eight full days.
I believe that through the women who call themselves “Checkpoint Watch,” rays of holy light shine, illuminating an important witness in a world lost in its own darkness. I pray that here, too, these three hundred lights will illumine thousands of darkened hearts. The women of ‘Checkpoint Watch’ work to save us all, one light at a time, one son (and daughter) at a time.
We are God’s sons and daughters, and only after that, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists. When we’ve been trying to save a world from its own violence as long as God has, you can bet anyone with a heart and a willingness to pitch in, is blessed indeed.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” reads one of the beatitudes, “for they shall be called the [children] of God.”
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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Lin Clineburg says
Bravo! How do we get this out to the wider world? It seems to me to be THE message for this advent season!