EPF PIN member Lynn Huber was part of a Compassionate Listening delegation to Palestine/Israel earlier this year.  She continues reflecting on what she experienced through current events on the ground.

Today I read an article in Time Magazine by Joe Klein entitled “Burned Books in the Holy Land: Jewish and Arab parents watch as Israeli’s hopes for peace fade.”

It is about an incident of attempted book burning (the little suckers are harder to get rid of than the vandals expected) by Jewish extremist terrorists who left the messages “No co-existence with cancer” and “Death to Arabs”.

The incident took place at Hand in Hand, an Israeli school in a border area between Israel and Palestine which houses a bi-lingual (Arabic/Hebrew) student body, staff and curriculum. There are regular meetings of the families of students, and a powerful program of on-going problem-solving and peacemaking. Then this.

The key word is “then”, not “this”. The difference between comedy and tragedy as I remember it from a college lit course is not whether or not there is conflict and suffering, but whether it is overcome. If evil wins, it is tragedy. If hope and love and peace win, it is called ‘comedy’.

For the first time perhaps in my life I suddenly became aware that as long as I continue to believe in, hope in, work for, practice the spiritual practices of love, hope and peace (not to mention the other ‘fruit of the spirit’ named by Paul of Tarsus1 such as patience, faithfulness, humility, self-control and kindness), there can be no tragedy. If the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner do not turn us toward greater fear and hostility, but renew in us our commitment to continue to work for racial justice and peace in this country, THEN those deaths are not, in this sense, a tragedy.

While we grieve, it is hard to remember that. And we are inundated by so much grievable news.

But as a friend of mine reminds me from time to time when I need such reminding (and as I remind her when she forgets), hope and love and peace and kindness and persistence are Christian virtues (and, I note, similarly virtues recommended to their practitioners by Jewish and Muslim wisdom teachers). So tragedy is not dependent on
the worst that can happen, but is never the last word if, holding on to the best of which we are capable, we refuse ever to give up.

Find what you need to nurture your own hope, love and peace. THEN never give up.

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1 Galatians 5:22.