As the obliterative bombing goes on in Gaza, I have become more and more distraught.  I trained in a Jewish hospital, Maimonides, in Brooklyn, which was named for the great rabbinical doctor Maimonides.  The doctors I trained with were amazing Jewish doctors, and they took God into consideration in all their deliberations about care for patients, and their personal responsibility, so I loved and counted on their wisdom and deep sense of ethics.  I have continued to have wonderful Jewish doctor friends, and they have been a mainstay of my spiritual journey.  I also have had dear and wonderful Moslem friends in medicine, and I have loved them and their love of God, also.   One of my anesthesiologist friends took his frail, elderly father on a Haj.  This took an enormous chunk out of the prime of his working life.  He did it with joy and kindness.    So this is just so terrible, watching the genocide in Gaza, in which hospitals are being bombed, and medical personnel is being killed, along with the patients.  70% of the deaths are noncombatants,  women and children.  It is unthinkable, and it is a war crime.

I wanted to share with you all that in my agony over this, I  got to participate in a really beautiful interfaith service on Sunday, here in Santa Cruz, sponsored by the interfaith community called The Tent of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.    Here is my summary of it—

Yesterday we had an interfaith prayer service for PEACE in our town, which was simply for people wanting to pray together, stretching beyond our own tradition, wanting not to vilify the others. People of many different faiths were part of it, and Moslems, Jews and Christian spiritual leaders spoke respectfully, modeling for us this conversation. After praying in silence and breathing, we broke into small groups at each small table. Our task was to share 3 questions, and ask each of the 5 people in our group to respond for a few minutes; then when they had said their say, finish with “I have spoken.” Then the rest of the small group around the table would respond to their share with “We have heard you.” This method was very powerful. We each felt deeply listened to, and heard. Cross talk was not allowed. People shared their experience of hurt, trauma, shame, grief, fear. We spoke about what we are doing to take care of ourselves. We ended with speaking about what shifted, what gives us hope.  

I feel this template of small group conversation, and the attempt to reach for common human feelings and goals, was a breakthrough. We were grappling with letting go of dogma, speaking of what matters to each of us, how each of us feels, the complexities in our families and communities which are making this harder, and how we long for peace and understanding. Interestingly, we were from different cultural and religious upbringings, and it was a time to be able to reach across, out of the comfort zone of our cultural attachments, toward our human connectedness. It was a wonderful time, and people’s faces reflected the joy of real conversations, and being able to share that hope for peace and understanding. We ended with spiritual leaders from each tradition offering prayers for peace, and then we sang “Imagine” from John Lennon. The singing pastor who played the song introduced it by saying that John Lennon also was responding, with this song, to the hope to reach beyond dogmas and beliefs, to what we all share as suffering humanity, hoping for peace.

The Tent of Abraham also co-sponsors with the people of Sangha Shantivanam, (a Christian-based interfaith group) our interfaith New Year’s eve event, which is also a miracle of respectful prayer for peace, with representatives of every religion and none, in Santa Cruz for the past 20 years. It is amazing that they had been planning this get-together before the events in Israel and Gaza happened. Because of it, many more people came than they had expected, but the shared experience of this kind of prayer over the past 2 decades made it more meaningful, and honest and trustworthy.

For me, to be in a community of people whose understanding of God is much more cosmic and universal, is a great relief. All my adult life, I have tried to broaden my language about faith, to be able to include all who are human in this way, not to exclude the best of who we are. Because we are trying to move past 100,000 years of human tribalism, and small-minded ideas of God, we are not always well-received or understood. I was able to breathe, after this event, and to sleep at night. I went to mass this morning, and there was an amazing reading from the Book of Wisdom, which of course is also part of the Torah. It talked about the souls being called home to God, and it said “They will shine. Like sparks in rubble…”. This was a perfect line for me to read, as Gaza is being bombed to rubble, and the Palestinians are being systematically eradicated. To be with others who feel the trauma of this in their own bodies was a relief. To be prayerful, recognizing the complexities was also a relief. Not hearing blaming and shaming language, belittling or vilifying the others, was a relief. Trying to breathe deeply through the pain, until we could regain our own peace, was also a gift. I felt the presence and the gift of our meditation practice here, as well as the AlAnon training to not give comments or opinions to another person’s share. Simply trying to do deep listening in prayerful presence, was very healing.To me, what we are doing here is trying to overcome an eon of human tribalism and violence, everything in human history which reflects belief in a small and vindictive tribal God, which always names the neighboring tribe as “enemy”. As you know, I am a person who believes in the vision of Pierre Teihard de Chardin, who was a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who worked in China. He embraced evolution and science, and described a cosmic, universal Christ who calls us into the Divine love, the divine milieu, from a perspective of eons of evolution, billions of stars, huge cosmic forces in the universe. Because of his vision, I still have hope, that humanity is going to move forward into what he called “the noosphere”– a cooperative human organism aimed at the good of all humanity and the planet– a “greater good”. We stand on the edge of what seems an abyss, but it is akin to the moment when inorganic molecules morphed, became organic and complex organisms capable of life.

With love, martina