It’s difficult not to feel helpless, hopeless about global problems. In particular these dark days with the news showing continuous videos of Israeli bombs completely destroying building after building in Gaza. The children sitting among the rubble, not knowing where the next bomb will fall. Many having lost family members.
I can’t even imagine the terror.
I usually attend FCNL’s (Friends Committee on National Legislation) weekly Witness Wednesday Silent Reflection. FCNL is a faith-based (Quaker) organization, and this is one way we bring attention to the Spirit into our work. Anyone is welcome to attend.
This is the prompt and query we considered this week (10/25/2023) during this time of widening, worsening conflict and devastation in the Middle East.
Larissa Sanhueza, FCNL’s Young Adult Program Manager, will be hosting our time of reflection today. She will bring the following lines from a song by León Gieco and has provided the English translations. Her query continues our string of reflections on the continuing threat of war and how we move forward with that reality.
Prompt:
Solo le pido a Dios
Que la guerra no me sea indiferente
Es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte
Toda la pobre inocencia de la gente
- León Gieco
“I only ask God
That war does not make me indifferent
It’s a large monster and it stomps strongly
all the poor innocence of the people”
Query:
In the face of constant violence and conflict, how can we remain present as well as accountable?
I recently wrote about the profoundly moving FCNL panel discussion about the chaos in the Middle East. (See: FCNL’s “Calling for a Ceasefire: Israel-Palestine Briefing”) That briefing followed this week’s Witness Wednesday Silent Reflection, complementing each other.
We are calling for a cease-fire and allowing humanitarian aid to reach Gaza. You can find ways you can help in the blog post referenced above.
There was one thing that struck me as something I could do. At the conclusion of the panel discussion, Bridget Moix (FCNL’s General Secretary) asked each of the three panelists how they maintained hope.
Odeliya Matter, FCNL program assistant for the Middle East Policy team, said she found hope in the beauty of the trees, to recognize the beauty around her.
Photography is a way I share my faith and hope. Many more people comment on the photos I share than on the daily blog posts I write. Those daily photos can be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/jeff.kisling.3/ )
The brilliant colors of the leaves are spectacular this autumn. Odeliya’s statement prompted me to share some of my photos with you here.
People often mistake hope for a feeling, but it’s not. It’s a mental discipline, an attentional practice that you can learn. Like any such discipline, it’s work that takes time, which you fail at, succeed, improve, fail at again, and build over years inside yourself.
Hope isn’t just looking at the positive things in this world, or expecting the best. That’s a fragile kind of cheerfulness, something that breaks under the weight of a normal human life. To practice hope is to face hard truths, harder truths than you can face without the practice of hope. You can’t navigate dark places without a light, and hope is that light for humanity’s dark places. Hope lets you study environmental destruction, war, genocide, exploitative relations between peoples. It lets you look into the darkest parts of human history, and even the callous entropy of a universe hell bent on heat death no matter what we do. When you are disciplined in hope, you can face these things because you have learned to put them in context, you have learned to swallow joy and grief together, and wait for peace.
IT IS BITTER TEA THAT INVOLVES YOU SO: A SERMON ON HOPE by Quinn Norton, April 30, 2018
