Today I posted on Amazon a review of a new book, actually an updated and enriched version of Whose Promised Land? by Colin Chapman. I called it “the most complete, the most objective and the most practical” of my whole shelf-full of books on this subject.
My review includes a brief summary of the book which I don’t need to give you here. I hope you will go to Amazon, read the review and consider buying this important book. I am not Colin Chapman’s publicist. I am a friend recommending to friends a helpful book. But I do want to tell you something not in the review, something very personal about how this book challenges and blesses me.
In 1963 when Wayne and I accepted an appointment to work in the Middle East we were given certain instructions and advice. I don’t have anymore the words of these messages. I do remember rather vividly that, among our responsibilities was that we would be advocates in the U.S. for the people we served overseas. This is a logical expectation. Living with a new people group, we should get to know them and begin to care about their concerns. This would prepare us to create interest in our new friends. And logically, if anyone wants to know something about Guatemalans, she will ask a friend who lives in Guatemala, not one who lives in Japan.
How I Got in Trouble
So…I wrote things: news, informative letters about situations in Jordan, and news features about people. What I wrote got me in trouble on occasion, because I was writing an Arab point of view that clashed with the accepted view of the Middle East. That apparently made it “political.” I began to read church propaganda carefully and discovered that anyone could write that the Holy Land rightfully belonged to the Jews; that message was “spiritual” or “religious.” But, if I wrote that Palestinians had been expelled or forced to flee from the only home they ever had, that was “political” and inappropriate.
Very shortly I admitted to myself and others that I was biased because I knew that the Palestinians had been abused, and I vowed that I would tell their side of the story. I studied, arming myself with facts and testimonies. The normal reaction in America to such things was that this was unfair because it was one-sided, but I noticed that anyone could tell a one-sided story without criticism so long as it was the “right” side.
Whatever I was writing, I still knew that there was an Israeli view. My insistence that the Arabs had been betrayed and trampled on, not just by the Zionists but by the world, never meant that the Jews had not suffered as no other people group had suffered. Like everybody else, I read with horror stories of the Holocaust. I am still reading them. I read once an article about a Jewish couple who had left a home in the U.S. to become part of the Zionist dream. They then lost their only son in one of Israel’s invasions of Lebanon. They would never have come to Israel, they said, if they had known it would cost them their son. This story touched me so much that for years I have thought about them, imagined their pain and understood their conclusion. I am sorry, so sorry, for Israelis who live in a powerful country but can see no peaceful future. All of us are in one way or another reaping what we have sown and should be sympathetic with one another.
Also important is that I experienced myself the ugly face of war. Twenty-five of our 30 years in the Middle East were not like peace with outbreaks of war but more like war with occasional outbreaks of peace. I came to believe that the basic ill of our world is the culture of violence. I hate what it has done to the Arabs, to the Jews, to Africa, etc. I hate what it has done to America.
My Ultimate Goal
If I have to reduce every intention and dream of my life down to one goal, it is to contribute something to peace in this world. For my grandchildren, ten beautiful young people, I want it. For their children, for the children of the Middle East, Muslim and Jew and Christian, what I want is not for them to win or to be right, but for them to live in peace.
Now, at last, I will tell you what Whose Promised Land? has contributed to my thinking on this subject.
Colin Chapman has made it plain to me that our biases are a hindrance to creating peace. I see clearly how this could be. Lately it has been so plain to me that most of us, including me, prefer to hear and read the stories that reinforce what we already believe. This habit has the tendency to polarize the population, drawing the lines between us ever more distinctly. It has nearly paralyzed our democracy and caused Christians to believe that some who worship Christ are not really Christians.
Bias is clearly an obstacle to compromise, cooperation, friendship and peace. And with all my heart I do not want to be an obstacle to peace.
Chapman’s book has also expanded my understanding of another basic Christian concept. Since I was nine years old I have known that repentance means to admit that I am on a wrong road and turn around, go in the opposite direction. Chapman quotes Denys Baly to help me reach deeper into the implications of this turning around.
“Repentance is not merely an act: it is an attitude of mind. It is a passion for the truth, an urgent desire to know the worst and the best, a readiness to begin again in a new way, a constantly proceeding examination of one’s way of life and with it all an ever remade decision to put right what is wrong.”
This means that the first step in another direction is only that. Along the continuing way, I will have the opportunity to keep learning. To profit from this opportunity, I must be willing to accept truth, any truth, whether or not it fits with what I want to believe. New truths may require changing my mind. I will naturally resist this unless I am committed to putting right whatever is wrong, whether it is in my own life or in the world.
At some level I have understood this for a long time and have been trying hard to read theology that challenges mine, political opinions I don’t like, and stories that differ from those I know. This is usually painful. Sometimes though, it turns on a light in a dark corner of my head or my heart.
What Chapman, with Denys Baly’s help, has done is to make me see that this is a Christian duty, part of my original turning around to follow Jesus.
Why do I tell this, baring my soul to anybody who bothers to click on this blog? Because I am calling on you to keep me accountable and help me succeed. I am inviting you to walk in the same direction, willing to embrace truth wherever you find it.
The whole truth has many small pieces. We cannot in one blog or even in one book tell the whole truth. All we can do is to tell what we know, the pieces we have, in the process recognizing that there are other stories, that all the people of the Middle East have stories, every one of them important. There are people we judge to be right and people we judge to be wrong, but all of them are just people with their limited lives and stories. All of them do what they do for a reason that makes sense to them or drives them in some way.
I am not posting on this blog or inviting others to contribute in order to promote any country. I am promoting peace for the sake of people. I am willing to post any story on this website, so long as it is a true and well-written story, sharing the human face of the Middle East. Without help I can post only what I know, which is not enough. I am committed to learning from the stories you can tell and giving your stories space on this platform.
Peace Salam Shalom