Summer of Forgiveness Tour

Next week, I go to Yale!!! It’s just a single class, but it is held at Yale Divinity School, and I intend to pick up sweatshirts and an accent to last me quite awhile. Along with all my innate snobbery, this opportunity seems to have provided me a surfeit of self-confidence, so that, as I start thinking about packing, I begin to feel something like a….rock star! (My own nerdy version of rock stardom, but nevertheless, a giddy kind of fun).

Which brings me to the Summer of Forgiveness Tour. Because every rock star has to have a tour, don’t they? And I’ve been thinking lately, lots about forgiveness—what it is and what it isn’t, and why it seems to be in short supply these days. At the urging of some friends, I’ve decided I should spend some time trying to get these thoughts together. All on my own, I’ve decided to consider it a tour, and subject whoever keeps on reading this to whatever forms these thoughts take on.

So here is my commitment: that, from now through Labor Day, I’ll try to focus on forgiveness in the essays that I post here. I hope that laying out this schedule will lead me to explore more deeply different aspects of forgiveness…pushing at the questions and the boundaries, rather than trying to come up with a single chunk or two about it. I guess we’ll all see how it goes, together, won’t we?

I’m going to begin with an essay I wrote two years ago, about a failure to forgive—or at least, to sympathize. The two, it seems, must be connected:

Forgive Us Our Sins

I cannot summon sympathy for Ariel Sharon. I feel I should—I call myself a Christian and he’s a fellow human being. The man has had a stroke.

But as it happened, I was in Jerusalem, the day Sharon began his latest war.

My mom and I, and my two sisters, were visiting the Holy Lands. Our scheduled tour of Old Jerusalem was gummed up by a campaign stunt—this guy, Sharon, was running for Prime Minister. Declaring each Israeli has the right to visit any spot in Israel, candidate Sharon stopped by Al Harim Al Sharif—the Temple Mount—one of the holy sites of Islam, which sits inside the walls of Old Jerusalem.

It took 1,000 soldiers and police to get him safely there and back.

The next day, mom and I stepped off the tour, to see for ourselves the sites we’d missed because of all Sharon’s security. We headed for the Mount of Olives, while my sisters set off for a Dead Sea swim.

It was a Friday, which meant 10,000 worshippers gathered at Al Aqsa—the gold domed mosque on Temple Mount. It was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, which meant more Jews than usual were praying right next door, at the ancient Jewish temple’s Western Wall.

As mom and I wandered through the Garden of Gethsemane—where Jesus had his doubts, and was arrested—10,000 Muslims prayed nearby, where Abraham proved willing to sacrifice his son. Where Ariel Sharon had brought his cops and soldiers and his campaign slogans, just the day before.

The Mount of Olives is a cemetery, rising from the Garden of Gethsemane. It climbs a hillside to the site where Abraham ascended, near the place where Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, to an Arab village and postcard-picture scenic overlook. From there, you look across a small ravine to the bright gold dome of Al Aqsa, the gleaming limestone of Jerusalem.

We looked, and saw the crowd depart the mosque. We later heard that there were scuffles between the Muslims and the Jews along the Western Wall. We heard that rocks were thrown, before the soldiers started shooting. From our location, we could only see the waves build up, as people in the crowd began to run. We heard the screaming, like a distant football game, and then we heard the shooting start.

The news reported seven Palestinians were killed by the police up on the Temple Mount that day. A few months later, Ariel Sharon won his election.

Jerusalem—September 28, 2000: My mom and I stand on a hillside and watch a war begin. Two young Palestinian boys race past, anxious to join in.

We follow them—our tour, our hotel, my sisters—everything we care about lays on the other side of those 10,000 Palestinians, fleeing Temple Mount.

A Cincinnati church group lets us climb onto their bus. We watch the riot through the windows, from our air conditioned coach seats.

Men carry bags of oranges, carry children, running from Jerusalem. Young men stop, and turn, and set their jaws, and work their way uphill, upstream, back into the fighting. Their fathers try to stop them.

A van pulls up, and 8 or ten young Hassids jump out, fists already flying. They are outnumbered by the thousands, and only last a minute before they’re back inside the van—bruised and bloody—and rushing to Jerusalem.

I might have laughed—it was so fast, and so ridiculous, these boys with their new beards and flying fists. Except they might have died. Except that they were carrying their injuries back to family and friends and synagogues and neighborhoods, from which someone might be inspired toward revenge.

If Sharon had not fouled up our tourist schedule, we would have missed the Russian convent of Our Father. It is set a little to the side, up on the Mount of Olives. It was not on our itinerary. It was a little scruffy and deserted on the afternoon we found it, on our own. On tiles set along the convent walls, the prayer that Jesus taught there is written in 140 languages. As my mom and I wandered the overgrown small paths, I tried to recognize the phrases I had learned in English: thy will be done—our daily bread—forgive us all, as we forgive each other.

Ariel Sharon lies in a coma. I cannot stop myself from thinking: he began a war to get elected. I also think: he’s not the only one. I think: well, Christ, it worked. I cannot bring myself to sympathy, though I have finally brought myself to one small, simple prayer: “Ariel Sharon lies in a coma. May God have mercy on us all.”

© 2008 Melissa Capers

[ At about the same time I was writing the essay above,

The Fetzer Institute launched its Campaign for Love and Forgiveness.

www.loveandforgiveness.org.

Thank heavens folks like me are balanced by folks like these, eh?]