Fr Peter-John Pearson: Gaza’s Lent Started in October

Having heard of the suffering of the people sheltering in Gaza’s Catholic church, which he knows well, Fr Peter-John Pearson reflects on how their Lent started in October.

Yesterday I read parts of an interview with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzabella, in which he spoke about those staying in the Holy Family parish compound in the beleaguered Gaza Strip. Most of them, but not all of them, are from the small Christian community who are observing this Lenten-tide with their very bodies.

This small community, including the priests and nuns, are now reduced to two meagre meals A WEEK and have almost no access to drinking water.

I was haunted all night by the thought of those people, many of whom I know from previously visiting Gaza. Those nuns (again, most of whom I know), and of that churchyard which I have crossed so many times. Some weeks ago, two parishioners, a mother and her daughter, were killed by snipers hiding in the shell of a house opposite the gates of the church compound.

None of these Christians, nor their Muslim families and neighbours, nor those children who search for weeds to eat, need to keep the Lenten fast nor the holy days of Ramadan. For them that fast began in the early days of October as bombs fell, assassins roamed the streets, and the already impossibly harsh lives they were living became something worse, more demonic than Dante’s Inferno.

The forced fast, the incendiary bombs offering the only flashes of light against the dark skies, consign more people to death under rubble every day. All the time that community painfully walks its daily, desperate Stations of the Cross.

The calendar this year marks not a month but many months of forced fasting — and all the while lorries carrying famine relief are deliberately kept waiting at the border crossings, forbidden to offer manna as our forebears received in the desert. Fewer trucks of aid were permitted into Gaza in February than the already pitifully few that entered in January.

It feels for me that in a few days when we prayerfully wish each other Ramadan Kareem, it will come too late. The fast began months ago. Dante’s Inferno continues, but now not the circles of greed or lust or heresy but the last ounces of energy desperately marshalled to hang precariously onto life.

It is the hell not of greed but of starvation, forced starvation with its echoes of the gulags and Auschwitz. It is now no longer Dante’s circle in hell where heresy stalks but rather the amazing grace that in this inferno the call to prayer still sounds from minarets of the remaining mosques.

In this hell, the bell of the Catholic church still chimes at noon and 6 pm and reminds us that the Angel of the Lord appeared — appeared to Mary, as that prayer teaches us and as Luke recorded. Every bit of faith tells me that the Angel of the Lord, the Angel of courage, the Angel of resilience and consolation, continues to appear in Gaza, to take the hand of the child desperately groping through the rubble looking for his parent. That the Angel of the Lord walks what once were streets, weeping as Rachael did for her children.

It still moves me that in this place, where it seems obviously the moral arc does not bend towards justice, that day after day in that church where I have prayed more times than I can recall, that there in the depths of the abyss, bread is broken and the cup is raised and in the beautiful cadences of Arabic, the priest reminds those whose lives and country is broken: “This is my Body broken for you…”

Now as then it is the irrefutable pledge of God that God’s presence is at its most intimate, its most embracing, its most understanding in the depths of brokenness.

Fr Peter-John Pearson is a priest of the archdiocese of Cape Town.