Intrepid Young Woman
This Christmas season, we are asking for your support. Partner with the critical work of FOSNA in the US and help amplify and support the essential witness of Sabeel, Jerusalem. The importance of our work is greater than it has ever been. With your support, Palestinian Christians can continue to practice steadfastness (sumud) in the face of the ongoing atrocities and genocide! Your support tells them that the world sees them, hears them, and loves them.
"And he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end” (Luke 1:33). Dr. Wageeh Mikhail.
Intrepid Young Woman
by Jesse Steven Wheeler
In art and literature, Mary is too often depicted as a meek and ultimately passive participant in the divine plan. "Virgin Mary, meek and mild," as the song goes. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.
Rather, hers is the story of an intrepid young woman, who upon being presented with an otherwise impossible situation as an unmarried first-century teenager, chose to risk everything—even her very life—for the sake of God’s reign and the world's liberation. Taking upon herself and embracing the inevitable shame that could have so easily extinguished the light she carried within her, Mary would eventually become the most honored woman in history. She is a proactive, selfless actor in the Christmas story with full agency.
In writing this, I am reminded of what FOSNA Board Co-Chair Saleem Alhabash shared last week in FOSNA's annual Christmas Appeal message:
For years, I have found that the Advent and Christmas story parallels the Palestinian experience . . . Mary, like many Palestinian mothers, was resilient in the face of a system that discriminated against her and her newborn child. Like so many mothers in Palestine, she would later experience the tragic loss of her son, who fell victim to an unholy alliance of corrupt religion, violent imperial power, self-interest, and greed.
Today, as I consider Mary’s story in light of present-day realities in the Holy Land, as we grieve with all our souls a modern-day massacre of the holy innocents in Gaza, I cannot help but remember that Palestinians, like Mary, have far too often been silenced, written out of their own story. We are inundated with phrases like:
“A land without a people, for a people without a land”
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian.”
“Israeli-Arab”
"Israel made the desert bloom."
"There never was a Palestinian state"
“Judea and Samaria”
"Terrorist"
For the Christians: "When did you convert?"
. . . among others.
In what amounts to epistemological genocide, such statements represent an attempt to cleanse our contemporary language and historical narratives of any reference to the indigenous Palestinians, the living stones of the Holy Land and literal descendants of the very first followers of Jesus. Meanwhile, as genocide unfolds in real time before our eyes, the journalists and authors, the storytellers, are being actively targeted, city archives are being actively destroyed, and social media accounts are being actively suppressed.
It's as if the truthtellers and the record keepers are seen as ultimately more dangerous than the perpetrators of violence.
It's an attempt to extricate Palestinians not just from their own land, but from their own stories, to silence their voices, as Mary has so often been silenced. Western theologies, in another act of silencing, too often attempt to understand the people and events of the Holy Land without any consideration for those who actually inhabit the Holy Land. In the words of Mitri Raheb,
For Palestinians, including the Palestinian Christian community, Palestine is a real land with real people. It is our homeland, the land of our ancestors. For Christians in the West, Palestine is an imagined land, a land that they know mainly from the Bible. It has little, if anything, to do with the real Palestine.
This simple fact, coupled with western imperial interests and the Zionist cause (Christian and Jewish) would be the cause of so much bloodshed over the last century plus. We are witnessing the fruit of this erasure now in Gaza, as Al-Ahli Anglican Hospital was officially shuttered after a raid by Israeli forces on Monday. Meanwhile, Israeli rockets struck the Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, affiliated with Mother Theresa, at the the Holy Family Catholic Parish this past weekend, home to 54 disabled individuals, destroying the generator, setting fire to the building, and rendering the building uninhabitable. Soon afterwards, two parishioners were shot by an Israeli sniper.
Likewise, we find partition plans and "peace accords" (and now post-war predictions and punditry) being concocted and proclaimed in foreign capitals and far away newsrooms, without input from the people on the ground most impacted.
And yet, the Palestinians never seem to "get the message." They refuse to disappear or go away, reasserting themselves into their narratives and in global discourses, standing firm upon the justice of their cause. The stories, images, and videos from Gaza keep coming against all odds. In the diaspora, too, city after city, we find intrepid young women (and men) leading demonstrations and engaging in nonviolent direct action, education, and political advocacy—often at great personal risk—secure in the justice of their cause.
Like Mary, these are women and men of agency, in whose liberation is bound our very own. It is for this reason that we, in our advocacy efforts, stand alongside our Palestinian sisters and brothers, hearing and amplifying their stories, centering and elevating their voices, and ultimately taking from them our cues—only leveraging our privilege to "run interference," educate our communities, and engage in advocacy as has been requested.
**This Christmas season, we are asking for your support. Partner with the critical work of FOSNA in the US and help amplify and support the essential witness of Sabeel, Jerusalem. The importance of our work is greater than it has ever been. With your support, Palestinian Christians can continue to practice steadfastness (sumud) in the face of the ongoing atrocities and genocide! Your support tells them that the world sees them, hears them, and loves them.**
Mary's Song (The Magnificat):
With all my heart I glorify the Lord! In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior. He has looked with favor on the low status of his servant. Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored because the mighty one has done great things for me.
Holy is his name. He shows mercy to everyone, from one generation to the next, who honors him as God. He has shown strength with his arm. He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations. He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed.
He has come to the aid of his servant Israel, remembering his mercy, just as he promised to our ancestors, to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.
—Luke 1:46–55
