When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices, so that they might go and anoint [the body of Jesus], and very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.
Several women hurried in the early dawn to anoint the body of Jesus. As precious as the spices they carried was the devoted love stored in their sorrowful hearts. This tender affection, strong as their grief, moved the women onward toward this compassionate deed. As the women walked to the tomb, they could not have envisioned anything that would soften the pain of the previous days. Had they stayed home, they would have missed the powerful experience of hope that arrived in the angel’s announcement.
The story of these women assures us that our suffering, too, can be transformed. When we go forth to anoint others with our attentive compassion, we find that our wounded hearts have something of value to offer them: empathic understanding and intentional care.
If we are willing to look beyond self, to reach out to those who bear life's injuries and sorrows and anoint them with our kindness, we will find our own pain lessened. I've known this in my life and in that of others who've borne the weight of suffering. The joy we receive will be not as earth-shattering as the Resurrection of Jesus but more like a slow-flowing stream that gradually washes the pain from our hearts and turns us toward gladness.
Joy of My Life,
may the love that dwells within my heart
be as fervent as that of the dedicated women
who intended to anoint your entombed body.
Come and surprise me with the gift of renewed hope.
Revive what has been lying dormant in my spirit.
Today: I anoint people around me with the joy of gladness.
I spoke in Ossining, New York [last night]. One of the most amazing things about the experience is how similar the audiences are all over the country. It’s such a privilege to have a chance to travel like this. On one hand, the various parts of the country are so different. But the faces in the crowd are so the same.
The intense listening. The obvious concern people feel for what’s happening in America, the intelligence you see so often displayed as a group, more so than you might necessarily pick up looking at any individual alone who is part of it. There clearly is such a thing as a group conscience.
Some people say Americans are apathetic right now, but I don’t think so at all. I think people are just processing the moment. In a way, a lot of us simply can’t believe that things have come to this. That we’re so obviously in trouble. It feels like something broke, and we have to figure out a way to put it back together.
Tonight, as usual, someone asked me, “But what can we do?” and my answer is always the same: we’re doing it right now. We’re thinking all this through. We’re joining together and listening to each other, having a deep and meaningful conversation, and reflecting within ourselves on what it all means.
The poet Rilke said we don’t always have the answer, and at times like that you simply live with the question. Wisdom has to marinate.
No powerful action happens unless it is first preceded by powerful thought. We need to think deeply, open our hearts as well as our minds, and then act with courage. What that specifically looks like in any one person’s life only that person can discern. But this is the moment, whatever it is. Let your heart crack open, and then do what it is that it tells you to do. 💖
Jesus felt left alone and forgotten. He lost all sense of consolation by the very one he had trusted as his Abba – the tender Father he communed with in his night vigils. No wonder his voice pierced the air with that anguished cry saturated with despair. Those words of Jesus declared the ultimate sense of defeat, empty and departed of hope. In his bleak hours of not only being crucified but also feeling desperately forsaken, Jesus knew the pain of an awareness of divine presence known to provide desperate relief from the fear of oblivion now being vanquished.
Decades ago, I sat by the bedside of a community member. She was my spiritual mentor, a woman fully committed to daily prayer and union with her Beloved. Sr. Perpetua’s physical pain came from bone cancer, but it was her spiritual suffering that startled me. She who had relished such a strong union with the Divine, whispered in a frail voice: “I’m unable to pray. Everything is dark. I can’t find God. Please pray for me.”
Her experience led me to open my heart to persons unable to conjure even a whisper of felt faith. If we ourselves have not been ambushed by this sense of being deserted by the Holy One, we can steadfastly support those who have felt such agony.
Desolate One,
how fully you lived our human experience,
even to the most utter barrenness of soul.
If my faith in you becomes just a distant memory,
remind me of your forsaken cry from the Cross
and draw me close to your empathetic heart.
Today: I remember how I have known the Holy One's steadfast love.
Israel has a long history of weaponizing false charges of anti-semitism to attack and undermine those fighting for human rights for Palestinians – and U.N. officials and experts have been among the most consistent victims of those attacks.
Almost 15 years ago Richard Falk, an internationally respected Princeton professor of international law who had just been appointed the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, was not only denied access to the occupied Palestinian territory to carry out the terms of his U.N. mandate, but was also arrested and jailed by Israeli authorities.
Since then every Special Rapporteur has been similarly excluded, their mandate and their work undermined, and their commitment to international law and human rights attacked as anti-semitic. Francesca Albanese[pictured at left] has been among the bravest of these Special Rapporteurs, maintaining her commitment to calling out all violations of international law relevant to her mandate – including when Israel has violated international covenants against apartheid and now, against genocide.
UPDATE: On Friday, March 29, 2024, Francesca Albanese was interviewed by Leila Fadel for NPR’s Morning Edition program. Following is the audio of this interview.
How agonizing for Jesus to admit an inability to sidestep his coming Passion and death. In the past, he demonstrated so much strength as he guided his ministry and life. Now he humbly submits and acknowledges that he cannot change this dreadful situation. And so, in the last hours of his physical life, Jesus again enters fully into our human condition.
Whether we want to admit it or not, none of us has complete rule over how our lives unfold. We try everything possible to preserve our self-reliance and be in control. We do our utmost to make things turn out the way we want – only to find that at some point we, too, are unable to have our journey evolve in a way that completely satisfies us.
Author Chris Anderson reflects on this reality in Light When It Comes. He suggests that powerlessness can be a source of profound personal transformation: “Sooner or later we have to face the suffering and emptiness and apparent randomness of the world and of our powerlessness before it. And until then, we can’t be healthy. That’s the paradox. Until we admit our need, we can never be happy. And that’s what Christ did. He embraced the emptiness so completely and lovingly he transformed it forever. . . . The story of Jesus is the story of the letting go and the giving up we have to do every day of our lives.”
Vulnerable Leader,
your ability to admit to powerlessness
gives me the courage to acknowledge my own.
When it is time to release what I cannot control,
be at my faltering side. Strengthen my intention
to yield what is impossible for me to change.
Today: I unite what I cannot change with the experience of Jesus.
Today I share a second compilation of perspectives and voices on the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza. I consider all of these voices to be ones of both reason and compassion. I hope you do too. (NOTE: For the first compilation, click here.)
_____________________
I start with a link to John Oliver’s informed and helpful perspective on the ongoing conflict between the Israeli government and Hamas, the political and military organization governing the Gaza Strip of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Oliver shared his perspective on the November 13, 2023 episode of his HBO show Last Week Tonight. To watch this highly informative and insightful 30-minute segment, click here.
Next is Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli peace negotiator at Taba under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during Oslo B negotiations. Levy was interviewed December 21, 2023 by Al Jazeera’s Dareen Abughaida, a Palestinian-Lebanese broadcast journalist based in Doha, Qatar.
The October 7 [2023] attack by Hamas on Israelis was horrific and brutal and a war crime. It is right to call it such. But when describing the killing and maiming of thousands of Palestinian children by the Israeli armed forces and by Israeli illegal settlers, the carpet bombing of refugees and hospitals, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the illegal kidnapping, imprisonment and holding hostage of Palestinian children for years, the genocide in plain sight of Palestinians, then the BBC and the CBC do not call this 'brutal' or 'horrific.' They practice a racist, political double standard that oils and enables crimes against humanity. . . . Supporting genocide now, as Canada, the USA, Germany and European countries are doing, is not the answer. It does not provide safety for Israelis. It does not stop antisemitism. It fuels the cycle of violence and hatred. It endangers all humanity.
Declaring, “We are outraged, we are heartbroken,” hundreds of protesters turned out to block President Biden’s motorcade en route to his [March 7] State of the Union speech, forcing cars to take “the long way” to the Capitol. Demonstrators from Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups said they were “holding a people's state of the union” to call for an end to U.S funding for Israel’s assault on Gaza. “We know the state of the union,” they said. “It’s a state of genocide.”
Concluding a day-long series of protests across Washington DC, hundreds of people in black shirts reading “Not In Our Name” and “Biden’s Legacy = Genocide” sat and stood along Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol, delaying Biden’s speech by about a half hour.
. . . Among those participating were members of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that works in Gaza and the West Bank trying to serve hot meals and find food and water for the displaced. “The Biden Administration has the power, and the responsibility, to stop the killing,” said AFSC General Secretary Joyce Ajlouny. “It is a cruel irony to drop food when at the same time the U.S. is funding the dropping of bombs.” Others argued that acts of civil disobedience are “the bare minimum” by way of response to an administration that has “lost (its) moral standing” by facilitating the slaughter of 30,000 civilians. “The State of the Union is genocide,” said one JVP member. “We will not accept a president who claims to be fighting for democracy while ignoring the majority of people he represents.”
The following is a statement written by Arundhati Roy and delivered on her behalf at the meeting of Working People Against Apartheid and Genocide in Gaza, at the Press Club, New Delhi, on Thursday March 7, 2024. The remarks were first published by Scroll, an independent media outlet in India.
The richest, most powerful countries in the Western world, those who believe themselves to be the keepers of the flame of the modern world’s commitment to democracy and human rights, are openly financing and applauding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Gaza strip has been turned into a concentration camp. Those who have not already been killed are being starved to death. Almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced. Their homes, hospitals, universities, museums, and infrastructure of every kind has been reduced to rubble. Their children have been murdered. Their past has been vaporized. Their future is hard to see.
Even though the highest court in the world believes that almost every indicator seems to meet the legal definition of genocide, IDF soldiers continue to put out their mocking “victory videos” celebrating what almost looks like fiendish rituals. They believe that there is no power in the world that will hold them to account. But they are wrong. They and their children’s children will be haunted by what they have done. They will have to live with the loathing and the abhorrence the world feels for them. And hopefully one day everybody – on all sides of this conflict – who has committed war crimes will be tried and punished for them, keeping in mind that there is no equivalence between crimes committed while resisting Apartheid and Occupation, and crimes committed while enforcing them.
Racism is of course the keystone of any act of genocide. The rhetoric of the highest officials of the Israeli state has, ever since Israel came into existence, dehumanized Palestinians and likened them to vermin and insects, just like the Nazis once dehumanized Jews. It is as though that evil serum never went away and is now only being recirculated. The “Never” has been excised from that powerful slogan “Never Again”. And we are left only with “Again.”
President Joe Biden, head of state of the richest, most powerful country in the world, is helpless before Israel, even though Israel would not exist without US funding. It’s as though the dependent has taken over the benefactor. The optics say so. Like a geriatric child, Joe Biden appears on camera licking an ice-cream cone and vaguely mumbling about a ceasefire, while Israeli government and military officials openly defy him and vow to finish what they have started. To try and stop the hemorrhaging of the votes of millions of young Americans who will not stand for this slaughter in their name, Kamala Harris, US vice-president, has been tasked with the job of calling for a ceasefire, while billions of US dollars continue to flow to enable the genocide.
And what of our country?
It is well known that our prime minister is an intimate friend of Benjamin Netanyahu and there is no doubt where his sympathies lie. India is no longer a friend of Palestine. When the bombing began, thousands of Modi’s supporters put up the Israeli flag as their DP on social media. They helped spread the vilest disinformation on behalf of Israel and the IDF. Even though the Indian government has now stepped back into a more neutral position – our foreign policy triumph is that we manage to be on all sides at once, we can be pro- as well as anti-genocide – the government has clearly indicated that it will act decisively against any pro-Palestine protestors.
And now, while the US exports what it has in abundant surplus – weapons and money to aid Israel’s genocide – India too is exporting what our country has in abundant surplus: the unemployed poor to replace the Palestinian workers who will no longer be given work permits to enter Israel. (I’m guessing there will be no Muslims among the new recruits.) People who are desperate enough to risk their lives in a war zone. People desperate enough to tolerate overt Israeli racism against Indians. You can see it expressed on social media, if you care to look. US money and Indian poverty combine to oil Israel’s genocidal war machine. What a terrible, unthinkable, shame.
The Palestinians, facing down the most powerful countries in the world, left virtually alone even by their allies, have suffered immeasurably. But they have won this war. They, their journalists, their doctors, their rescue teams their poets, academics, spokespeople, and even their children have conducted themselves with a courage and dignity that has inspired the rest of the world. The young generation in the Western world, particularly the new generation of young Jewish people in the US, have seen through the brainwashing and propaganda and have recognized apartheid and genocide for what it is. The governments of the most powerful countries in the Western world have lost their dignity, and any respect they might have had. Yet again. But the millions of protestors on the streets of Europe and the US are the hope for the future of the world.
Almost 80 years ago, the world made a pledge not to let the horrors of the Holocaust repeat. And yet, they are repeating today in Gaza.
Right: A father kisses the body of his child killed by the Israeli army, at Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on January 13, 2024 (Photo: Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)
. . . In the 1940s, Jews across Europe were forced into ghettos and concentration camps where they faced starvation, abuse and mass death. The Nazis used hunger as a method of control and dehumanisation. The constant threat of violence, deportation, and death destroyed bodies and souls.
Tales we have heard about the ghettos and concentration camps echo today in Gaza, where 2.3 million of us are crammed into ever-dwindling areas and forced to endure unliveable conditions. When you put side by side the accounts of atrocities both of these peoples faced, you will see that history is repeating itself, only this time the entire world is watching and it is doing nothing to stop it.
The solemn vow of “never again”, birthed from the ashes of the Holocaust, was meant to prevent the repetition of its horrors. The commitment etched into the collective conscience of the world was a promise to vulnerable peoples across the world that they would be protected, that their tormentors would be stopped.
Yet, as we turn our gaze towards the ongoing Palestinian struggle, this pledge rings hollow. The shadows of past atrocities linger in the present-day experiences of the Palestinian people.
. . . In these dark times, “never again” cannot remain a mere phrase of remembrance; it must become a call to action. The world must act on its pledge to uphold the dignity and rights of all people, in every corner of the world and prevent yet another genocide from taking place.
Following is U.K.-based Novaro Media’s March 8 report on the situation in Gaza. It features excerpts from a recent CNN report, along with commentary from Novaro Media hosts Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani.
If we condemn Hamas for its October 7 attacks in Israel, we’re not accused of anti-Arab bigotry. Nor should we be. Nothing could possibly justify the atrocities that Hamas committed against hundreds of civilians, who were the majority of the 1,200 people killed as a result of the attacks by Hamas forces. And nothing can justify the taking of civilian hostages.
But if we condemn Israel for its actions since then, we might be accused of antisemitism. Meanwhile, nothing could possibly justify the atrocities by Israel in Gaza, where the death toll is now estimated at 32,000, while uncounted thousands of other Palestinian people are buried under rubble. Seventy percent of the victims have been children and women.
. . . While Israel continues to slaughter children, women and men – no more guilty of anything than a crowd you might see at a local supermarket – the extreme misuse of the “antisemitism” charge often boils down to: Be quiet. Don’t protest. Don’t even speak up.
Of course antisemitism does exist in the United States and the rest of the world, and it should be condemned. At the same time, to cry wolf – to misuse the term to try to intimidate people into silence while Israel’s atrocities continue in Gaza – is an abuse of the word antisemitism and a disservice to everyone who wants a single standard of human rights.
Next is another segment from Novaro Media. This one is from March 16 and focuses on broadcaster, political commentator, and author Mehdi Hasan’s informed critique of television personality Piers Morgan’s “racist double standards” when it comes to his coverage of Gaza and Israel.
Cruelty upon cruelty: Today is Mother’s Day in Gaza, and across the Arab world. Still the slaughter, the wounding, trauma, hunger go on. Israel has killed over 12,000 Palestinian children, with many thousands more injured or orphaned ; each day, 37 more mothers are killed. Those who survive battle to keep their children alive, and mourn those they’ve lost.
“The children are always ours,” said James Baldwin. But in Gaza, says one mother, “Today, like all mothers, I feel broken.”
This year, the Mother’s Day marked each March 21 is, for Gazans, a bloody travesty. The numbers still numb: More than 31,988 people have been killed in the ongoing) Israeli assault; another 74,188 have been injured, including over 32,800 children and 25,000 women, and 25,000 children have lost one or both parents.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society estimates this Mother’s Day would have been commemorated by 37 mothers killed; it was also marked by Israeli forces denying 28 Palestinian detained mothers from seeing their children. To date, Israel's “there-are-no-innocents” air campaign has dropped over 29,000 bombs, many of them 2,000-pound munitions that maim or kill within a quarter mile – often in so-called “safe zones” or “safe corridors” where Israel has told Gazans to go. Meanwhile, their relentless blockade has left at least half the population at imminent risk of famine; in recent weeks, at least several dozen children have starved to death.
When children are present in a time of genocide, writes Palestinian pediatrician Sabreen Akhter, they are always the most afflicted. and the most in need of protection. When children are in a place that is bombed, they die more often than adults due to their smaller bodies and organs: “When you bomb a place with children in it, your primary intention is to kill all the children first.” When they’re in a place lacking sustenance, they die more quickly: “When you cut off water and food to a population with children, your primary intention is to starve all the children first.” When they're without housing and exposed to the elements, they are more traumatized, and die more rapidly.
A U.N panel said Thursday Israel appears “calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinian children.” At least, urges Al-Jazeera, “Know their names.” Last month, they compiled perhaps half the names of the young dead known to them when the total was 11,500; even then, it takes over seven minutes to scroll through.
For mothers who survive, their daily mission is to keep alive the children who remain to them. A 29-year-old mother of three whose husband was killed in a recent “flour massacre” – while trying to feed his children – struggles to feed her five-month-old, because her breasts have almost no milk from lack of food and “deep sadness”: “The baby keeps crying all day and night.
A 49-year-old mother hasn’t seen her only son, Ahmed, 16, since he rushed to the nearby scene of an Israeli air strike in October; she believes he was killed but has been unable to find or retrieve his body from the rubble.
Nada Abu Aita, a 32-year-old “mother missing her mother” – who fled to Rafah – gave birth to her first son a month before the war and is fighting to “keep him alive, or stay alive for him.” “I sometimes look into (his) eyes and I want to apologize for bringing him into this life,” she says. “I am afraid I will lose him, and I am afraid I will be killed because he would be left alone.”
And Alaa el-Qatrawi, a 33-year-old, PhD-educated poet and teacher, lost all four of her children in December. Separated from her husband, she saw them only part-time and last heard from them trapped amidst fighting when they called to beg, “Mama, get us out of here” – which she tried, but failed to do. Much later, her brother-in-law found their bodies. Lovingly, she names them: “Yamen, eight years old. The twins Orchid and Kanan, six years old. And Carmel, three years old.” She speaks of them in the present tense: “They’re beautiful . . . They’re so smart and funny . . . Kenan loves fruit . . . I would put some next to him when he sleeps (for) when he wakes up.” She had been trying to arrange to move her children to Dubai “for a better future”; she'd bought Orchid “a princess dress” for summer, “and now summer will come and Orchid isn't here to wear it.” In earlier wars, she’d written prose or poetry; in this one, she can’t.
“What can a grieving mother say about her children?” she asks. No words.
And finally, here is Al Jazeera’s Dareen Abughaida’s December 29, 2023 interview with Dr. Omar Suleiman, an American Muslim scholar, civil rights leader, writer, public speaker, and founder of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. In this interview, Dr. Suleiman talks about the oppression of pro-Palestinian voices in the west, and the growing Islamophobia and how it lends itself to racism.
I’m proud of this American woman! If corporate media gave her one percent of the air time they lavished on Trump she would smash the competition and they know it. That’s why she’s been blacklisted and banned from the airwaves. Please spread her words amongst friends and family, for the good of our children and for the good of our country!
