Tag: free palestine

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bible study Current Events / Activism easter Holy Days LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary Reflections for worship services

Today is Easter Sunday. Today is Trans Day of Visibility. Today is day 176 of genocide.

This year the lectionary gives us Mark’s account of the Resurrection, with its fearful cliffhanger ending — an empty tomb, but Jesus’s body missing. And isn’t that unresolved note fitting?

In the face of so much suffering across the world, it feels right to be compelled to sit — even on this most jubilant of days — with the poor and disenfranchised in their continued suffering.

Mark’s account:

Just days before, the women closest to Jesus witnessed him slowly suffocate to death on a Roman cross. Now, now trudge to his tomb to anoint his corpse — and find the stone rolled away, his body gone. A strange figure inside tells them that Jesus is has risen, and will reunite with them in Galilee.

They respond not with joy, but trembling ekstasis — a sense of being beside yourself, taken out of your own mind with shock. They flee.

The women keep what they’ve seen and heard to themselves — because their beloved friend outliving execution is just too good to be true. When does fortune ever favor those who languish under Empire’s shadow?

A painting in a style resembling stained glass of three women standing over a coffin, which is empty except for strips of white and yellow linen. The women's hands are raised in confusion and shock.
“The Empty Tomb” by He Qi.

Love wins, yet hate still holds us captive.

I’m grateful that Mark’s resurrection story is the one many of us are hearing in church this year. His version emphasizes the “already but not yet” experience of God’s liberation of which theologians write: Christians believe that in Christ’s incarnation — his life, death, and resurrection — all of humanity, all of Creation is already redeemed… and yet, we still experience suffering. The Kin(g)dom is already incoming, but not yet fully manifested.

Like Mark’s Gospel with its Easter joy overshadowed by ongoing fear, Trans Day of Visibility is fraught with the tension of, on the one hand, needing to be seen, to be known, to move society from awareness into acceptance into celebration; and, on the other hand, grappling with the increased violence and bigotry that a larger spotlight brings.

The trans community intimately understands the intermingling of life and death, joy and pain.

When we manage to roll back the stones on our tombs of silence and shame, self-loathing and social death, and stride boldly into new, transforming and transformative life — into trans joy! — death still stalks us.

We are blessedly, audaciously free — and we are in constant danger. There are many who would shove us back into our tombs.

An art piece structured like a collage featuring an elegant figure wreathed in fire, with text around them reading "& like any goddexx you are scorned & become the fire anyway." The figure is pouring pitchers of water into a pool at their feet; green hills with various flowers stretch up around the pool.
Art by Amir Khadar, based off the poem “litany in which you are still here” by kiki nicole

And of course, the trans community is by no means alone in experiencing the not-yet-ness of God’s Kin(g)dom.

Empire’s violence continues to overshadow God’s liberation.

The women who came to tend to their beloved dead initially experienced the loss of his body as one more indignity heaped upon them by Empire. Was his torture, their terror, not enough, that even their grief must be trampled upon, his corpse stolen away from them?

The people of Gaza are undergoing such horrors now. Indignity is heaped on indignity as they are bombed, assaulted, terrorized, starved, mocked. They are not given a moment’s rest to tend to their dead. They are not permitted to celebrate Easter’s joy as they deserve. They are forced to break their Ramadan fasts with little more than grass.

Photo of a blanket set with bowls of grass soup and slices of lemon
A photo of a Palestinian family’s meal, taken in Gaza.

Those of us who reside in the imperial core — as I do as a white Christian in the United States — must not look away from the violence our leaders are funding, enabling, justifying.

We must not celebrate God’s all-encompassing redemption without also bearing witness to the ways that liberation is not yet experienced by so many across the world.

This Easter, I pray for a free Palestine. I pray for an end to Western Empire, the severing of all its toxic tendrils holding the whole earth in a death grip.

I pray that faith communities will commit and recommit themselves to helping roll the stones of hate and fear away — and to eroding those stones into nothing, so they cannot be used to crush us once we’ve stepped into new life.

I pray for joy so vibrant it washes fear away, disintegrates all hatred into awe.

In the meantime, I pray for the energy and courage to bear witness to suffering; for the wisdom for each of us to discern our part in easing pain; for God’s Spirit to reveal Xirself to and among the world’s despised, over and over — till God’s Kin(g)dom comes in full at last.

Painting of a woman playing a flute with several birds around her, as below her a line of Palestinians make their way up towards the city of Jerusalem. The colors are warm and bright.
Painting by Palestinian artist Fayez Al-Hasani
Categories
Current Events / Activism

Palestine: history, current events, ways to help

a poster titled "the world stands with Palestine!" featuring three figures with upraised fists in front of a globe and olive branches. One figure wears a keffiyeh hijab.
"The World Stands with Palestine" by shenby g for the Arists Against Apartheid project

I originally had these resources pasted to the end of poem, but by request I am pasting them as their own post now, with more links added.

Please feel free to recommend more resources. Let us all do our part — Palestine will be free!

HISTORY

CURRENT EVENTS

DREAMING OF A BETTER FUTURE

WAYS TO HELP

  • Urge your University/School/Organization to put out a statement denouncing Israel
  • Organize a Protest/Participate in a local one
  • While calling your reps, tell them that as a voter, you’re unwilling to support them in the upcoming election unless they urge the White House to take a stand against Israel and stop funding them
  • Share art/writing/films around Palestinian culture (see this tumblr post for Palestinian media to watch; I also recommend Oriented (2015) for an un-pinkwashed queer Palestinian story)
  • If you’re part of a union, ask them what they’re doing to urge their industry leaders to take a stand against Israel + pressure the White House OR urge them to start a strike/walkout/etc if they’re not doing anything already
  • Talk with your friends IRL about Palestine; keep spreading information on social media — don’t let talk of Palestine die down!
  • See if your city/state council has put out a statement in support of Gazans. If not, try to push them to do so.
Categories
Current Events / Activism My poetry

“What words can do” — A poem for Palestine

A photo of Palestinian professor Refaat Alareer on a green background is accompanied by a verse from a poem that reads "I pull up a lecture by Refaat Alareer, who believed in the power of a poem to soar above the rubble crushing its poet's corpse..."

Half a world away from me
they are killing a people they claim does not exist
using my taxes, my country’s ghoulish gifts —
our bullets and bone-eating phosphorous,
our bombs, and our blessing to use them ­—

they are killing the doctors to kill all hope of healing
they are killing the journalists to kill all calls for justice

and what can I do? With what can I fight
to end this nightmare I’m complicit in
by birthright?

All I have, it seems to me, are words.

I scrawl them on protest signs,
arrange them into stilted, inept poems,
deposit them into the answering machines
of politicians who persist
in signing over all our souls for oil.

they are killing the old women
with nothing left to their names
but tales of how things were

and, God! they are killing the children
who listen to the tales and spin
them into dreams of how things yet could be

And what, in God’s name, can I do? What
can all the words
winging forth from all the corners of the earth
do?

what dream can rise unscathed from so much ruin?
what song is not drowned out
by the drones’ constant humming?

I pull up a lecture by Refaat Alareer
who believed in the power of a poem

to soar above the rubble
crushing its poet’s corpse.

they are killing the poets
whose words are seeds are kites are embryonic deeds

In the lecture, his voice speaks
to me from beyond the grave, haunted
by that soft electric hum
endemic, it seems, to classrooms all over.

In the lecture, he is saying

there was an Israeli general
for whom one poem by Fadwa Tuqan
packed a punch more potent than the guns
of twenty enemy fighters.

In the lecture, he is pleading:

“Don’t ever say Tuqan was arrested
‘just’ for writing poems”

and how could I, how could I
do anything but promise him, “I won’t!”

when he himself was killed a month ago
“just” for nurturing the poems in others,
“just” for reeling those poems out,
slim and supple as kites, into the world?

what song or verse, what thin prophetic cry
can scale a wall eight meters high?
one built to be buffeted, bombed — and still fly.

In the lecture, he is promising

as long as we can imagine Palestine free,
we can unlock that future reality

from a classroom that is rubble now —
the IDF bombed his university in October.
They say it was an important Hamas site.

Maybe it was

or maybe it was a danger “just” because
its teachers, its students, kept slipping their poems
past checkpoint gates

filling the world with prophecies of freedom
that “just” might make
a battered but persistent people free.

they can kill children women journalists
they can kill doctors dreamers prophets poets
but still (we must believe!) the poem lives on.

So take up your pen, or take up Gaza’s song
and spread the word forth: Palestine lives on.

Please feel free to spread this poem around online or offline. Just credit Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com.

You can find me reciting this poem in video format on TikTok here and on Instagram here.

If you’re interested in more poetry for Palestine, check out my podcast episode here.

About this poem:

These last few months, I have been reading a great deal of Palestinian poetry. Poems are my heart’s language, and I have been deeply moved by the long proud history of Palestine’s resistance poets, who have used their art to defy the colonialist lie that there is no Palestinian people or culture. For decades, these poets have been targeted by Israel’s government because the power of their words cannot be denied.

Before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 7, 2023, Professor Refaat Alareer was a professor of creative writing and world literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he worked to nurture his people’s creative powers and broadcast Palestinian poetry to the world through efforts like the We Are Not Numbers project.

Many of Alareer’s lectures are available on YouTube; around nine minutes into an introduction to poetry, he discusses how art helps us imagine what we have never experienced so that we can work to make those dreams reality. In it, he speaks to his students:

“We’ve never been to other parts of Palestine because of the Israeli occupation, but we’ve been told so many times by our parents and grandparents, especially our mothers, have been telling us stories about Palestine…the good old days how Palestine was, all nice and beautiful, unoccupied, un-raped… Our homeland turns into a story. In reality we can’t have it, we don’t have it. But it can turn into poems, into poetry, into literature, into stories.

So our homeland turns into a story. We love our homeland because of the story. …And we love the story because it’s about [class joins in] our homeland. And this connection is significant. Israel wants to sever this relationship between Palestinians and land, Palestinians and Jerusalem, and other places and cities. And literature attaches us back, connects us strongly to Palestine,…creating realities, making the impossible sound possible.”

When we look at the weapons the IDF wields, courtesy of imperialist powers like the United States, what are words? Why bother speak up? Alareer assures us that our words do matter. In the same lecture as above, he speaks of the Palestinian resistance poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003), whom Israel arrested. Why, Alareer urges us to consider, would Israel feel so threatened by someone who wields no weapon but a pen?

“…We always fall into this trap of saying, ‘She [Fadwa Tuqan] was arrested for just writing poetry!’ …So we contradict ourselves sometimes; we believe in the power of literature changing lives as a means of resistance, as a means of fighting back, and then at the end of the day, we say, ‘She just wrote a poem!’ We shouldn’t be saying that.

Moshe Dayan, an Israeli general, said that ‘the poems of Fadwa Tuqan were like facing 20 enemy fighters.’ … And the same thing happened to Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. She wrote poetry celebrating Palestinian struggle, encouraging Palestinians to resist, not to give up, to fight back. She was put under house arrest, she was sent to prison for years.

And therefore, I end here, with a very significant point: Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry. …It took them years — over 50 years — of thinking, of planning, all the politics, money and everything else. But literature played one of the most crucial roles here. …Palestine in Zionist Jewish literature was presented to the Jewish people around the world … [as] a land without a people to a people without a land. ‘Palestine flows with milk and honey. There’s no one there, so let’s go.’ … And there were people — there have always been people in Palestine. These are examples of how poetry can be a very significant part of life.”

Professor Refaat Alareer in a 2019 poetry lecture

It turns out that words are working — slowly but surely.

Since October 2023, the journalists and everyday people in Gaza who have been bravely broadcasting their stories to the world, and those across the world who have been spreading those stories, and organizing protests, and refusing to be silent in the face of government powers and heavy propaganda, are having an effect. Israel is concerned about its public image, which our collective words and actions are damaging.

So keep sharing Palestinians’ stories; keep writing; keep contacting your representatives; keep protesting.

We won’t stop till Palestine is free.

Categories
advent Holy Days My poetry

Poem: Advent in (another) genocide

Photo of a statue of the infant Jesus among rubble, with text from a poem reading "This year, Mary is just one of many Palestinians failing to find a safe place to give birth. This year, Jesus is just one of many born into rubble."

This poem came to me after learning that Christian leaders in the Holy Land have asked churches not to organize any “unnecessarily festive” activities, in solidarity with Gaza; as well as seeing the Nativity scene set among rubble in the Lutheran Church of Bethlehem this year.

Find resources on what’s happening in Palestine and how to help below the poem.

Please feel free to share around; credit to Avery Arden (they/them) with a link to binarybreakingworship.com.

This year, Mary is just one of many
Palestinians failing to find
a safe place to give birth.

This year, Jesus is just one
of countless born
into rubble.

This year, the newborn Christ

dies 

his little body bombed
and tossed aside
into the growing pile.

This time, Jesus never makes it to adulthood —
doesn’t even make it the eight days to circumcision.
He doesn’t die a grown man
making a conscious choice
to defy Empire armed with naught but dreams

of a world where all the nations live as one
where last are first 
and all wars done —

No. This year, his newborn life is threat enough —
his family’s mere existence is rebellion enough  —
to warrant eradication.

Actually, it was then, too, two thousand years ago
— for Empire always fears the ones it grinds
beneath its millstone — back then, though
Christ’s parents found safe passage into Egypt —

now, snipers shoot them as they try
to leave the hospital that scarce had room
for one more woman’s labor cries.

Stigmata are
that much more
chilling between
an infant’s eyes.

And now, as then, some may blame Jesus’s death
on his own Jewish people — but
resist this lie! Now, as then,
the crime is Empire’s

with Western Christians at the helm

and those who would cast stones, look first
for your own nation’s name etched on the bombs
and tear gas canisters!

And, God,
if there is any hope at all
to wrestle from the rubble

as churches all across the Holy Land
close their doors to Christmas joy this year —
a holy choice to mourn with those who mourn
as Christ’s homeland is made a massive grave —

it’s this: there are still children left to save.

It’s this: not every olive branch has burned.

It’s this: the sacred promise of a God
who dies whenever Empire’s outcasts die —
that those cast down 

will rise.

Palestine, Palestine! I swear we will not cease
to shout your name until, at last, your streets
sing with your children’s laughter, loud and free.

– Avery Arden

Notes on this poem

I am writing this note after revising some middle portions of this poem, and coming away still unhappy with the results.

As a Christian who believes that God expresses a solidarity with the oppressed so strong and intimate that They are literally one with every oppressed person, I cannot help but recognize Christ within the people being killed and expelled from their homes in Gaza right now. Christ is there among them, and that means he is among their dead as well as their displaced.

As the Rev. Munther Isaac of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem on the West Bank preached in October,

“God suffers with the people of this land, sharing the same fate with us. …God is under the rubble in Gaza. He is with the frightened and the refugees. He is in the operating room. This is our consolation. He walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. …”

For Christians like Rev. Isaac, Christ’s intimate identification with those the world calls least, those whom Empire threatens to eradicate, is central to any sense of comfort they may have in the face of so much devastation. It’s also central to my own faith and personal understanding of the Divine.

Yet in this context, because modern-day Israel is a Jewish state, exploring that Divine solidarity comes with a great risk of perpetuating the long, harmful history of antisemitic blood libel and accusations of deicide. How do we affirm God’s presence with those suffering in Palestine without (implicitly or explicitly) adding to the poisonous lie that “the Jews killed Jesus”?

In wrestling with this complexity, I tried to write this poem to uplift both Jesus’s Jewishness and his solidarity with Palestinians. Jesus was born into a Jewish family, his entire worldview was shaped by his Jewishness, and he shared in his people’s suffering under the Roman Empire. His solidarity with Palestinians of various faiths suffering today does not erase that Jewishness. Nor does it mean that Jewish persons don’t “belong” in the region — only that modern Israel’s occupation of Palestine is in no way necessary for Jews to live and thrive there, or anywhere else in the world.

I also aimed to point out (sacrificing poetic flow to do so, lol) that Israel is by no means acting alone in this attack on Gaza or their decades-long occupation of Palestine. There is a much larger Empire at work, with my own country, the United States, as one of the nations at the helm. Israel is entangled in that imperial mess, and directly backed and funded by those forces — not because of what politicians claim, that we have to back Israel or else we’re antisemitic, but because Israel is our strategic foothold in the so-called Middle East. How do we name our complicity as our tax dollars are funneled into violence across the world, and act to end that violence?

Ultimately, I don’t know that this poem is a successful one. I don’t know if it avoids perpetuating harm. If nothing else, I hope it sparks conversation about resisting antisemitism as much as we resist Zionism.

Palestine Resources

HISTORY

CURRENT EVENTS

DREAMING OF A BETTER FUTURE

WAYS TO HELP

  • Urge your University/School/Organization to put out a statement denouncing Israel
  • Organize a Protest/Participate in a local one
  • While calling your reps, tell them that as a voter, you’re unwilling to support them in the upcoming election unless they urge the White House to take a stand against Israel and stop funding them
  • Share art/writing/films around Palestinian culture (see this tumblr post for Palestinian media to watch; I also recommend Oriented (2015) for an un-pinkwashed queer Palestinian story)
  • If you’re part of a union, ask them what they’re doing to urge their industry leaders to take a stand against Israel + pressure the White House OR urge them to start a strike/walkout/etc if they’re not doing anything already
  • Talk with your friends IRL about Palestine; keep spreading information on social media — don’t let talk of Palestine die down!
  • See if your city/state council has put out a statement in support of Gazans. If not, try to push them to do so.