Yesterday at my Quaker meeting, we labored over a minute about Gaza. A challenging task complicated by my faith community’s propensity to wordsmith, I remained silent while we’d grappled, believing that holding the space and the people I love in prayer was what I was called to do.
It was only in the wee, small hours of this morning that I realized that I’d recognized a dynamic being played out before me. Would it have been helpful to stand and to name what I sensed? Perhaps. But the words had not yet come. And as we’d been reminded by the reading at the beginning of our meeting, “God’s Time” takes its time!
So here’s something like what I might have said: “For far too long, each of us has taken in the absolute horror happening in Gaza. We have been horrified. The work to truly acknowledge the profound and utter devastation perpetrated with our complicity and in real time is lonely work. Desolation is lonely work. Grief is lonely work. People of faith, people of peace, people who believe, as did James Naylor, that “There is a Spirit, which I feel, which delights to do no Evil nor revenge any Wrong,” we have individually grappled; struggled. Yet as people of integrity, we knew we must. So we did. Like that old spiritual, we did it by ourselves. Coming from those individual and lonely places of utter grief, although the writers of this minute have collectively struggled and labored, some of us here this afternoon may be struggling to move into a shared space. Yet we must trust that our horror, our grief is shared! Everyone here and on Zoom has walked that lonesome valley, too.”
