I have just listened to the latest Proost poetry podcast, this time, a conversation between Proost’s Talitha Fraser and the poet/dancer/coreographer/community psychologist/film maker Justina Grayman. It is one of those conversations that you just have to let wash over you- full of deep insight and beautiful poetry.
As well as her poetry, Justina makes art like this;
You should check out Justina’s website for other poems, dance films and perhaps the best – most creative – profile I have ever read.
Feeling powerless in the face of such egregious injustice can result in a loss of trust or faith, not just in governments and institutions but also in the moral order of the world, and its ability to protect children. I wonder what the impact of this will be: will it, as certain politicians no doubt hope, result in a numbness that presents as indifference? Traumatic events can result in a lack of affect – millions more people should be marching and raising their voice – but they can also be channelled into righteous anger.
I certainly feel a profound loss of faith. Something I felt to be true about humanity – that people are fundamentally good, that we owe it to children to protect them – has shifted because of this conflict. I walk around with a feeling of heaviness that I cannot seem to shake. Thousands of miles from Gaza, I am changed by the past 18 months. I have learned that, for some people, compassion for children has political limits. What does one do with that terrible knowledge once it sits inside you like a leaden stone? I don’t seem be able to find an answer.
Whilst, I refuse to join her on her loss of faith in the goodness at the heart of humanity, It is impossible not to agree with the seeming numbness we feel towards the on going horror unfolding in Gaza. Like the photo above, we look from distance – worse than this, we look only through the goggles we are given.
A channel 4 news report yesterday made the rather sobering point that the images of dead and starving children in Gaza are NOT SHOWN in Israeli media at all.
This is shocking, right? Can it really be true that in this so-called bastion of democratic liberal western civilisation, media outlets are so compliant as to generally not show the consequences of Netanyahu’s vengeful war crimes?
But what about the rest of us? How is it possible to see reports like this and ignore the human suffering – to demote it to something less important than OTHER human suffering, or even worse, render it as necessary for the pursuit political or economic expediencies?
Or even worse than that – obscure it behind religious doctrines, like Zionism?
We are all living in the shadows cast for us by algorithms made from our search histories, our viewing habits, our social media connections. To pretend any of us are free from influence or constructed sectarianism is foolish indeed. However, what is happening just now is more than just the consequences of our media bubbles. In the face of such horror, we have switched off.
Some of us have stopped looking, others never looked at things like this in the first place.
Let me tell you a story. I must be careful how I tell it, because I do not want to create more hurt and division. It is a story in which I am certainly not the hero – in fact it is one that ends in defeat. Perhaps I should have titled this piece ‘How not to speak to Zionists.’
In the early days of the current Israeli invasion of Gaza, I posted this on a forum I was hosting. It was a discussion about using art, spirituality in the service of social justice, and I was interested in the fact that a church in London had hosted this gathering.
I then found myself in an extended discussion via message and e-mail with a friend who saw things very differently than I did. Their concern was firstly about Roger Waters, who they felt was a proven antisemitie.
As the discussion went on, it became clear that my friend also believed strongly that the protests against the war in Gaza within the progressive Christian circles we had both moved in were also antisemitic, and that the use of words like ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ in relation to Israel’s necessary war – triggered as it was by the horror of October the 7th – placed Jews all over the world at risk.
Our discussion was always polite, but we were never able to find much common ground, despite having so much else in common. My friend shared how, when the October the 7th events were unfolding, they had felt a huge collective wave of fear, related to the past persecution and present uprise in antisemitic attacks all over the world. The very present need for a modern state of Israel as a home for Jews was a holy, Godly pursuit in this context. It was Shiloh.
In return, I tried to talk about the generations of injustice and increasing oppression of the Palestinian people, and how Zionism has had terrible consequences for indigenous residents of the Holy Lands. I raised the issue of the West Bank settlements and abandonment of the rule of law. The shooting of children throwing stones. The forcing of people from their homes and ancestral lands. The unequal health and educational outcomes and so on.
I tried to talk about those cases in which war crimes by the IDF had been investigated – for example the terrible case of Hind Rajab, the 6 year old killed beside her family whilst on the phone to the emergency services – and the ambulance staff killed trying to reach her. My friend became quite irritated, saying that ‘we can all find terrible stories’ and anyway, ‘the IDF is the most humane army in the world’.
In the end, all we could do was agree to differ, and to go our seperate ways as the terrible war continued to get worse and worse. As thousands more children died under the rubble.
I often found myself thinking about our conversation though. I even wrote this poem in an attempt to process it all in my head;
.
Victims
.
My victims are more victimised than yours
She said, pointing to the blown-out bus
And the young bodies under blankets
Swimming in pools of broken glass
.
My genocide is more genocidal than yours
She said, pointing to a pile of scuffed shoes
To empty wooden huts behind rusted wires
And a yellow star on a stained jacket
.
The prejudice we experience is more prejudicial than yours
She said, pointing out the broken synagogue windows
The graffiti and the students protesting peacefully
In a public park
.
She must not know about Ahmed’s beautiful little sister
There was a time when it seemed like the war in Gaza might be over. A very unequal ceasefire was negotiated and prisoners were being exchanged for hostages. Bodies were being pulled out from beneath the rubble of hospitals, schools and mosques. People were making the long walk home, or at least to the pile of rubble that had once been their homes.
Meanwhile I was still wondering about my friend and feeling uncomfortable with how our discussion had ended. I was also wondering if they had changed their position at all, so I reached out again and asked if they wanted to talk. This time it would be face-to-face, via Zoom. My friend graciously said they would like to do this, and suggested that we start by watching this video;
I watched this video twice. I have a background within the social sciences, so have spent a long time thinking about prejudice, racism and scapegoating. Antisemitism seems to me to come from the very worst of what we are and can be as humans, and I have no argument with almost all of what Sachs has to say in this video. We need to understand how people from a Jewish background feel in the face of rising antisemitism across Europe.
This fear seems to be a big part of my friend’s desire for people like me to stop using pejoritive terms like ‘genocide’ in relation to Gaza. As far as they are concered, this produces direct results in the form of antisemitic attacks.
But there is more we have to talk about in relation to this ugly phenomenon. Firstly, it is not just antisemitic attacks that are increasing, but also anti-islamic violence, which has grown three times more, according to this report by Hope Not Hate.
Tell MAMA, the leading agency on monitoring anti-Muslim hate, has recorded a 335% spike in hate crimes from 7th October 2023 to 7th February 2024 compared to the same time period the previous year, a record high since the charity began in 2011.
British Jews have also faced similar consequences, as events in Israel and Palestine frequently drive increased antisemitism in the UK. The Community Security Trust (CST) recorded reports of 4,103 anti-Jewish hate incidents in 2023, a rise of 147% compared to 2022. Two-thirds of incidents happened on or after 7th October, a 589% increase in reports from the same time period in 2022.
It seems to me that we are now in a strange new world in which the far right – previously the political engine for so much antisemitism – are confused by the fact that Netanyahu’s governement is also on the far right. A lot of that hatred has been redirected towards Muslims, but a lot still remains. Add to that the way that the concept of antisemitism has arguably become a political weapon to silence dissent – used with no sense of irony by right wing newspapers such as the Daily Mail (despite its own shameful record of antisemitism.) There are also the murky waters of Labour party politics, in which the labour left has been silenced in the face of its apparent antisemitism. What we are left with is a new landscape in which hate is rising and old politics are being destablised and undermined. VIolence is always likely in these circumstances.
Where does this take us in relation to Zionism and the war in Gaza, which has now entered a new phase in which ethnic cleansing is being openly talked about as a military aim? In which starvation is talked about by Israeli ministers as a legitimate tactic to drive Gazans out of their land? This was all yet to kick off again when I was talking to my friend, so instead I tried to ask what might be the common ground we could find. I also wondered whether their position had shifted at all – if their views had changed in the face of such overwhelming slaughter and destruction.
It seemed clear that there had been no change at all in the views of my friend. I was genuinely perplexed at this, as I felt them to be a good person, full of spiritual depth and insight. How could the scale of death and destruction not have evoked some kind of empathetic response, critical of the actions of the perpetrators of such slaughter?
The first problem was how to agree on the nature of this death and destruction when you can not agree on the validity of sources of information. My friend made it clear that he no longer consumed any media sources apart from The Times of Israel, because all other sources of information – including the BBC – were biased. This newspaper does seem to be fairly centrist in its approach, but a centre media bias rating does not necessarily mean a source is totally unbiased, neutral, perfectly reasonable, or credible, just as Left and Right don’t necessarily mean extreme, wrong, unreasonable, or not credible.
The only defense against limiting our perspectives is surely to do our best to read outlets across the political spectrum. This is a hard lesson for us all, as we tend to look for articles that confirm our bias or become ways to point out the ‘wrongness’ of the other but without this effort, it is perhaps no surprise that my friend had made no journey of discovery.
The next problem was a religious one, in which my friend said something like this;
Here’s a thought. I wonder if my perspective is a big picture one, yours a close focus. Both of which are important, both of which can learn from the other?
Your perspective is particularly focussed on the misbehaviour of the state of Israel, tiny but in comparison with its close neighbours strong. So the reactions of the IDF in Gaza loom large.
Mine is a big picture, long-term view, shaped by the Shoah and centuries of antisemitism, seeing the current conflict as just the latest example of ongoing concerted attempts to kill Jews and to destroy their place(s) of safety. We are in a struggle for existence.
Was it about the fear we mentioned earlier, leading to a kind of bunker mentality in which survival seems to justify such punitive violence, even for good people like my friend? I can only speculate as pretty soon, our conversation ground to a halt. In the face of the comment above, I found myself writing this rather harsh, angry reply;
I honestly find the idea of it incredulous. I cant go with the big picture/close picture split, no matter how neatly this might enable us to place things.
The ‘big picture’ you describe is entirely one sided. It does not engage with the complex history of the Palestinian people, or the history of violence, displacement, breaking of international laws that have stemmed from that.
My exasperated and rather unkind response- via e-mail too, rather than face to face – was the end of the discussion.
I wish we have been able to talk about a different kind of common ground- after all, we are both followers of Jesus, and yet we spent no time at all seeking to place the teachings of Jesus into this dreadful context. I think I felt like this would have been to use Jesus as a stick to beat my friend with – Jesus as a dialectical debate weapon – which did not feel apprporiate, but in hindsight, I still find myself wondering why this was not our common ground.
Might talking about Jesus have made us think about what loving our enemies or seeking to be peace makers in this context might have looked like? We will never know I suppose. We missed out on this particular blessing.
Clearly I am not the person to answer this question, but talk to them we must.
We have to understand each other, to humanise and seek compassion, particularly with those with whom we have a disagreement. Particularly in a world in which violence is increasingly seen as a legitimate response to political, religious or geographical difference.
Perhaps we have to start too by understanding the way fear works, particularly the legacy of such global hate as the Holocaust. How it is weaponised by people like Netanyahu and his media machine. How it is fostered and monetised by the algorythm.
But we must go beyond fear, back towards compassion. We must name those who are victims on both sides, not just the Israelis. Not just the Gazans.
We must call out the war makers for what they are – on both sides…
…and we must grieve for the children, who grow in this polluted, toxic rubble we have made for them.
I played cricket yesterday. It was the first match of the season, which we won, despite dropping at least 15 catches (I have a black finger of shame) and enjoying many comedy moments. So it was, stiff and sore, that I ventured into the garden early this morning to attend my ‘church’.
The birds sang hymns.
Deer in the thicket were present but unseen like the Holy Ghost.
I planted onion sets like one might lay down gifts at the altar.
I wove and tied up live willow as if wrestling with theology.
I mark my blessings one by one. No matter what may unfold in the future, I count this day – its beauty, it’s promised companionship and the health I now enjoy – as a gift I should treasure…
…and it all made me think about the earth that sustains us. The community that carries us. The inter-relatedness of everything…
…and the spirit (that I sometimes call god) who holds it all together – or perhaps it would be better to say ‘who loves it all by becoming what s/he loves’
Every year over the May bank Holiday, for decades now, I have taken a ‘wilderness retreat’ with a group of friends and a widening network of people who love wild places. We spend time on small uninhabited islands, sometimes in silence, at other times making temporary community. The chat veers from (very) profane to the deeply spiritual, sometimes with no break in between. In fact, the rude and crude humour seems even to be a route towards the sacred, in the way it brings us to honesty and shared vulnerability. I am deepy grateful for these times spent with people who have become my closest friends. We have accompanied each other through good times and bad, as well as charting (and even inspiring) great changes in our individual life and faith.
This year, we were heading to an island called Insh, but weather diverted us as the wind direction would make for a difficult landing for 12 people and all their tents and baggage. We ended up on the island of Lunga, tucked hard up against Scarba, the other side of the Grey Dogs tidal race.
In the end, the island was kind. We met (and were welcomed by) the owner. The sun shone. We saw otters, golden and sea eagles. Wild geese graced the skies above us. The ticks feasted on us. We sat around fires and shared life. We shared communion.
As I left, I took the island with me. My friends still carry me.
Each year, I try to bring ideas and make a theme for our gathering. This year was all about original goodness.
What has been happening in the meantime? The lovely Pope died. Trump has continued Trumping. After a fragile ceasfire, Gaza became a killing field again where genocidal racists do their worst. The Labour government has made a scapegoat out of the poor, cutting benefits that were already slashed beyond the point where they could sustain healthy life… this list is dragging me down down down so I had better stop.
Another thing that happened was a that the High Court here in the UK made a ruling – based on an interpretation of existing law – that concluded long-running dispute between some feminist advocacy groups and the Scottish government. It has been an ugly dispute, and the organisation supporting the action (For Women Scotland) has been backed financially by author J K Rowling, herself a divisive figure in this area.
This from Al Jazeera, here.
On Wednesday, five judges ruled unanimously that the term “woman” in the existing UK Equality Act should be interpreted as only people born biologically female, and that trans women, even those with GRCs, should be excluded from that definition.
The ruling further clarified, therefore, that trans women can be excluded from certain single-sex spaces and groups designated for women, such as changing rooms, homeless and domestic violence shelters, swimming areas and medical or counselling services.
“Interpreting ‘sex’ as certificated sex would cut across the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ … and, thus, the protected characteristic of sex, in an incoherent way,” Justice Patrick Hodge said while summarising the case. “It would create heterogeneous groupings.”
The court added that the ruling was not a “triumph” of one side over the other, and emphasised that transgender people are still protected from discrimination under UK law. However, some protections, the judges clarified, should only apply to biological females and not transgender women.
The campaign to limit the interpretation of sex has gathered much right-wing religious support, but I ave found it difficult to come to a clear view of this for myself. On the one hand, I see just how marginalised transgender people have been, and how dangerous this has been both in terms of violence and exclusion, but also suicide rates. On the other hand, the debate between different kinds of feminists was difficult to understand.
This ruling has forced me towards seeking deeper understanding. Where to start?
I could dig into the biology- which is far from conclusive. This from Steve Chalke via X
Yesterday’s Supreme Court’s ruling was not based on science. Sex determination is not ‘self-explanatory’. Sex is not simply about genitals, but also sex chromosomes & DNA. Courts used to declare it was ‘self-explanatory’ that being gay was a perversion. They were wrong then too! I stand with trans people, made, like me, in God’s image! #NOLO
Then along came a brand new album by Derek Webb. It broke me. Called Survival Songs, it is an album offering love and acceptance to the gay and trans community.
This album did not ‘change’ my mind, but it solidified it.
Given a choice, I will stand with those who are marginalised and excluded.
The art world here in the UK has a bit of a new trend, in the form of pop up art exhibition spaces, typically in old shops. Accross the Clyde from where we live there are two such spaces. They tend to get booked very quickly, so we booked some slots. Then we began to wonder…
Our son-in-law James makes ceramics ‘inspired’ by trauma following spending years as an oceanographer, watching the arctic icesheets melt. Meanwhile, our art and my poetry was constantly trying to explore themes of brokenness and earth connectedness. We started to wonder about a joint exhibition…
…but then we started to think bigger and invited some others to join us.
Raine Clarke with her printmaking and general creative magnificence.
Paul Knight with his creative explosion of ceramics, sculpture and ink drawings
Yvonne Lyon who is not content with being a singer-songwriter, so also makes stunning abstract art.
Here is the brief for the exhibition, based around a poem that some might recognise.
“Given what we know and what we fear about the end of things we hold dear, we will look to the birds. We will walk the woods that remain, and we will sing”
How do we respond to a world in omni-crisis in which our politics, our economics, our spirituality – even our protest movements – all seem broken?
In a world polarised and splintered by algorithms, what does goodness look like? We know there are no easy answers to these questions.
Perhaps, like us, you are experiencing hope as a rare and hard to reach commodity.
In this context, we need our artists and our poets more than ever…
Raine Clarke
Launch evening
On Monday the 12th of May, we will be having a launch evening in the exhibition space. There will be live music and Poetry, not to mention the odd tipple. Watch social media for more details!
I have been loving the start of the daily lent posts over on the proost.community blog. If you are needing something to give pause and focus during this season, you might want to check it out.
Even better, we are looking for contributions- poems, music, art, anything really.
Because today’s post was my poem, I thought I would replicate it here.
Spring window, Otter artwork by Sarah Woods.
This morning, up here in Scotland at least, the sun is shining, the sky is blue and the sea flat calm. If you had no connection to the world we are part of – if we were truly able to live in this moment alone – then it would be a day to truly glory in. In an age of smart phones and media feeds, many of us find this impossible. There is a background noise to our times that is oppressive. I will not list the reasons for this – you know already.
There is something that unites many people on all sides of the political spectrum just now – a sense that things are not right, that deep within our culture, our economics, our political systems, our ways of living life, something is not working.
Does this dichotomy remind anyone of anything? How about the beginning of 2020?
That was another glorious spring, with a different kind of oppressive background noise. It might be difficult sometimes to remember, this is not the first time that humans have lived like this. This is not the first epoch of injustice, of super-rich so-called-superheros, of wars and division making. Think about it.
So this morning I offer one of my own poems, written back in that 2020 springtime. It became part of a book illustrated by Si Smith.
Human races
The upright ape ascends from knapped flint to Silicon chip. He scratches sonnets in split slate and Solves problems (almost) as fast as he makes them. His alchemy promised gold, but instead just turned the Lights on, lighting a road ahead called Progress.
There is nothing new under the sun; the circle is still Unbroken. Empires rise whilst others fall; ours was Not the first at all. It turns out that our times were never Linear (just oscillation) and that for every page of Knowledge gained, another is forgotten.
But what are we, if not whisps of the same Spirit? We carry in us the same am-ness as all things that ever were, Hidden under thin skin and hubris, waiting for those moments Beneath stars or trees or tenderness when we remember; It is all about connection.
It has been a while since I have posted any new poetry here. This is not because I am not still writing, rather because the way that poetry allows me to explore ideas (which this blog is primarily about) fluctuates.
Today however, I am going to share a brand new poem, which makes some rather profound theological statements – ones that I know many of my friends will find troubling.
I’m not going to explore them here – at least, not yet. I am not even sure that I agree with them all just now.
This is one of the gifts of poetry – it can become it’s own voice, its own person. As well as a way of exploring then externalising, poetry can go further than this, and be part of a dialogue even with its author.
The dialogue does not even need to find agreement. It might be possible to hold more than one perspective – as if our theological constructs are just different poems.
It is in this space that this poem sits just now. In committing the words to keyboard and screen, I am able to stand back and consider them as if they were not mine.
Except they are mine. In writing them, I was consciously breaking through some barriers into places that feel new.
I was thinking about the book of Revelation today – perhaps the most controversial book in that library of books that we know as the Bible. I grew up in a kind of religion that took this book and used it as a lens to understand world events, particularly (but not exclusively) what has happening in the middle east.
This was before all the current madness, stemming from things like the Left Behind series of books, and all the American Christian Zionism.
Back then, we had people like Hal Lindsay and The Late Great Planet Earth. It was the same stuff and it earned him a fortune.
I still know people who live within this bizarre world view, in which world events are viewed through a particular, modern, Capitalist and elitist interpretation of scripture. In some ways this is the first and ultimate of conspiracy theories- ground zero. All the ingredients are there- the special secrets that will open your eyes to ‘reality’, the sense of being part of a special selection, the cataclysmic alternatives, the network of others who see things like you do and constantly reinforce your world view.
There is also the unforunate side effect of how these ideas, now almost mainstream in the US, have made victims out of already oppressed people and become a wierd distraction for many at best, perhaps actually morally corosive.
Perhaps these ideas are even antichrist.
I will not be deconstructing end times eschatology in this post. If you are interested in digging deeper into this, then I would recommend this podcast;
Back to my cogitations on Revelation. I was thinking about how we might (as with Keith Giles’ account) better approach this book as a confusing veiled analogy of the danger of Empire.
How powerfull, charismatic and despotic individuals can first seem like messiah, but then turn out to be beasts.
We do not have to look far to see examples of these kind of individuals. Ones for whom death, destruction, exploitation and subjugation are just political tools, used casually for personal power and profit.
But I will not name any person ‘Antichrist’. I have heard Christians name many people this way over the years. The Pope, Gorbachev, Putin to name but a few.
What I think I can call antichrist are those things that are against the teachings of Jesus – those things that are contrary to a movement towards goodness otherwise known as ‘the Kingdom of God’.
There seems to be a particular kind of antichrist-ness that uses the Bible as a means to achieve its aim. I find myself loathing this most of all – Jesus did the same. He seemed to reserve a special kind of anger for the religious people who were users, profiteers, division-creators, victim-blamers and hate dealers. Think about these examples;
The Sermon on the Mount:Jesus directly challenges the teachings of the Pharisees by emphasizing the importance of inner motives and true righteousness over outward actions.
“Woes upon you, scribes and Pharisees”:In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus delivers a series of pronouncements condemning the religious leaders for their hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
Cleansing the Temple:A dramatic act where Jesus drove out those selling animals and money in the temple, criticizing their commercialization of a sacred space.
There is danger here of falling into that same old dualistic us/them, good/bad, holy/profane trap in which we retire into a trench built of sandbags full of our own rightness. But despite this danger, after conversations this week I am going to say this. Christians have no monopoly on Christ. We are all capable of being antchrist. This is true in the small things and the big things.
Lets subjugate everything to love, to kindness and to compassion – particularly towrds the weak, the poor, the broken. Anything else is empire. Anything else is antichrist.
this fragile tent 